Episodes
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It's time for another lively and informative "Ask Us Anything!" webinar. This time, we're featuring Linda Vicaro and Lynn Howell, the KaiNexus Lean Strategy team, joined by host and moderator Mark Graban.Learn more about our webinars: https://www.kainexus.com/webinars
It's time for another lively and informative "Ask Us Anything!" webinar. This time, we're featuring Linda Vicaro and Lynn Howell, the KaiNexus Lean Strategy team, joined by host and moderator Mark Graban.
Learn more about our webinars: https://www.kainexus.com/webinars
Related Content:
Watch all three Habits webinars and more Mark's "Lean Office Gone Wrong" videoQuestions:
Linda and Lynn , could you tell us about your professional background and career? Feel free to add a fun fact if you'd like.
How can we effectively communicate the value of continuous improvement to leadership and secure their buy-in?
How can we engage leaders to support ongoing daily continuous improvement or small Kaizen initiatives that might not have immediate, impressive ROIs?
How do we explain the benefits of continuous quality improvement and data usage to those who believe, "we already collect data" but don't use it to improve processes?
What strategies can overcome employee resistance to change in a lean transformation? What are best practices for engaging staff in continuous improvement?
How can a small company with limited resources start implementing lean practices?
How can a large organization with over 20,000 employees foster a culture of continuous improvement despite slow processes?
What tips and processes can help during an in-person session to create a new process for assessing and onboarding technology?
How can we integrate lean with existing digital transformation efforts to enhance continuous improvement and innovation?
How can we ensure consistent implementation and sustainment of lean practices over time?
Where should a sales or service-oriented organization focus first when implementing continuous improvement?
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Join us for another exciting and insightful "Ask Us Anything!" webinar featuring the KaiNexus Lean Strategy team. This interactive session is scheduled for June 20 from 2:00 - 3:00 ET.
Register here
Presenters:
Linda Vicaro Lynn HowellHost and Moderator:
Mark GrabanIn this live event, our experts will tackle your questions about continuous improvement, lean methodologies, and more. Whether you submit your questions in advance or ask them during the webinar, our team is ready to provide valuable insights and practical advice.
🔹 Submit Your Questions: Get your queries answered by Linda, Lynn, and Mark by submitting them ahead of time or participating live.
🔹 Who Should Attend: This webinar is perfect for anyone involved in or curious about lean strategies and continuous improvement, including industry professionals, managers, and enthusiasts.
Don't miss this opportunity to engage directly with the KaiNexus Lean Strategy team. Subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell to stay updated on our latest content and live events.
📅 Date: June 20🕑 Time: 2:00 - 3:00 ET
Follow Us:
Website: KaiNexus LinkedIn: KaiNexus LinkedIn#LeanStrategy #ContinuousImprovement #KaiNexus #Webinar #AskUsAnything
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Blog post link
Gemba walks have become a widely adopted management technique. Leaders gain valuable insights into organizational value flow and often discover improvement opportunities by directly visiting the work environment. This collaborative approach involves employees sharing details about their tasks and the reasons behind them.
Why are Gemba Walks Important?
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Today, host Mark Graban (a Senior Advisor) with KaiNexus is joined by our new Vice President of Marketing, Josh Feldman.
We'll learn about his background, why he joined KaiNexus, and why he moved from Chicago. Is he is Cubs fan or a White Sox fan? And what does his think about Chicago pizza? The answer may surprise you.
Learn more about KaiNexus: https://kainexus.com/
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The blog post
James Womack and Dan Jones are the founders of the Lean Enterprise Institute and the Lean Enterprise Academy (UK), respectively. Their book, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, is considered by some to be the bible of Lean Manufacturing. It was initially published in 1996 based on their in-depth study of Toyota’s fabled Toyota Production System (TPS).
Womack and Jones realized that every business output results from a process. Process thinking in operations management requires leaders and workers to view the organization as a set of related processes that work together for a common goal rather than a group of departments supporting a specific function.
These ideas are widely used by organizations in every sector to better design, track, and optimize business operations. Companies have not done away with functional departments. Instead, they view the work departments do differently. Departments don't exist on their terms. Each receives inputs from other functions and provides outputs that other departments must consume to complete their work.In short, each function or person contributes to one or more business processes. So, instead of managing departments, process thinking means managing entire operations. A process might move through a series of teams or functions, each with its requirements, but the purpose of each one is to create value for the customer, which is what matters.
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Watch the recording and more info
This was presented on May 30, 2024 by Dr. William HarveyEnterprise excellence and inclusive excellence are closely linked, and real-world challenges have shown that both are essential to the success of any organization. To achieve enterprise excellence, organizations must focus on improving their operations and processes while creating an inclusive environment that engages everyone. In this interactive session, the facilitator will highlight commonly established business practices and how they limit our ability to engage everyone every day. More importantly, though, participants will likely gain increased awareness of what we can do differently to maximize enterprise excellence through deliberate inclusion.What is Enterprise Excellence?Enterprise Excellence is a holistic approach that's aimed at achieving world-class performance across all aspects of the organization.What might I learn?A way to engage all in creating Inclusive Excellence. Lessons from the US military and their parallels to the story of Harry Potter. How belt systems and CI teams can destroy inclusive practices. How leadership language invites people to the party. There are three things leaders can do to engage everyone every day: maximizing psychological safety to create environments where folks learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo.Who might benefit? Anyone and everyone leading folks from the shop floor to top floor.Dr. William Harvey is a seasoned Operations Leader with extensive experience in chemical processing, manufacturing, and operations management. At Michelman, he currently oversees multiple sites, leading teams in strategic planning and coaching/practicing continuous improvement. William is set to start his eighth year of teaching at the University of Cincinnati where he teaches marketing, finance, and management. William holds various certifications in change management, quality, leadership, operational excellence, team building, and DiSC, among others.
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Register to attend the webinar or view the recording
Presented by Dr. William Harvey on May 30, 2024, 1 pm ET.
Enterprise excellence and inclusive excellence are closely linked, and real-world challenges have shown that both are essential to the success of any organization. To achieve enterprise excellence, organizations must focus on improving their operations and processes while creating an inclusive environment that engages everyone. In this interactive session, the facilitator will highlight commonly established business practices and how they limit our ability to engage everyone every day. More importantly, though, participants will likely gain increased awareness of what we can do differently to maximize enterprise excellence through deliberate inclusion.
What is Enterprise Excellence?
Enterprise Excellence is a holistic approach that's aimed at achieving world-class performance across all aspects of the organization.
What might I learn?
A way to engage all in creating Inclusive Excellence. Lessons from the US military and their parallels to the story of Harry Potter. How belt systems and CI teams can destroy inclusive practices. How leadership language invites people to the party. There are three things leaders can do to engage everyone every day: maximizing psychological safety to create environments where folks learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo.
Who might benefit? Anyone and everyone leading folks from the shop floor to top floor.About the Presenter:Dr. William Harvey
Dr. William Harvey is a seasoned Operations Leader with extensive experience in chemical processing, manufacturing, and operations management. At Michelman, he currently oversees multiple sites, leading teams in strategic planning and coaching/practicing continuous improvement. William is set to start his eighth year of teaching at the University of Cincinnati where he teaches marketing, finance, and management. William holds various certifications in change management, quality, leadership, operational excellence, team building, and DiSC, among others.
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Link to the blog post
James Womack and Dan Jones are the founders of the Lean Enterprise Institute and the Lean Enterprise Academy (UK), respectively. Their book, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, is considered by some to be the bible of Lean Manufacturing. It was initially published in 1996 based on their in-depth study of Toyota’s fabled Toyota Production System (TPS).
Womack and Jones realized that every business output results from a process. Process thinking in operations management requires leaders and workers to view the organization as a set of related processes that work together for a common goal rather than a group of departments supporting a specific function.
These ideas are widely used by organizations in every sector to better design, track, and optimize business operations. Companies have not done away with functional departments. Instead, they view the work departments do differently. Departments don't exist on their terms. Each receives inputs from other functions and provides outputs that other departments must consume to complete their work.In short, each function or person contributes to one or more business processes. So, instead of managing departments, process thinking means managing entire operations. A process might move through a series of teams or functions, each with its requirements, but the purpose of each one is to create value for the customer, which is what matters.
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Read the blog post
Maybe Albert Einstein was talking about continuous improvement when he said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Too often, we see organizations struggling to measure only those things that can be tied to a dollar amount and they, unfortunately, neglect the impact of ALL improvements. Let’s have a look at the top six ways to measure the impact of your organization’s improvement efforts.
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Presented by Elizabeth ChaseView slides and videoJoin us for a look at how one library’s practice of Lean introduced a city to its benefits and informed the design of the 5th largest public library in Texas, a 158,000-square-foot library (in a repurposed rocket factory).Covering everything from creating a Lean training curriculum to specific examples of applied Lean fundamentals – with a detour into Vaccine site administration – this webinar has something for everyone interested in continuous improvement and/or libraries.Elizabeth Chase is the Material Services Manager for the Frisco Public Library.Elizabeth began her career with the City of Frisco in 2003. Before taking her current position, her roles at the Library included Adult Services Reference Librarian, Cataloger, and Senior Librarian.In the category of “other duties as assigned,” Elizabeth is a member of the Frisco Lean Team Steering Committee, which develops and implements Lean certification for City employees. Her primary role is teaching a 4-hour Lean fundamentals class to employees throughout the City and celebrating the improvements made as a result.
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Read the blog post
The renowned football coach and philosopher, Vince Lombardi, once said, “Perfection is unattainable, but if we chase perfection, we catch excellence.”
That’s the mindset of a Lean organization. There’s a bedrock belief that every process, investment, employee, or action should directly translate to value for the customer with no waste. That ideal is unattainable, of course, but Lean organizations try to get close to it every day, and in doing so, reach a level of success that their competitors can only envy. Every Lean organization is unique, but there are some core qualities that they tend to have in common.
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Register for the webinar
Join Mark Graban as he hosts Elizabeth Chase to preview her webinar...
April 24 from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm ET
Presented by Elizabeth Chase
One City’s (and Library’s) Lean Story… Abridged
Join us for a look at how one library’s practice of Lean introduced a city to its benefits and informed the design of the 5th largest public library in Texas, a 158,000-square-foot library (in a repurposed rocket factory).
Covering everything from creating a Lean training curriculum to specific examples of applied Lean fundamentals – with a detour into Vaccine site administration – this webinar has something for everyone interested in continuous improvement and/or libraries.
Attendees will be able to ask as many questions that dive into specific details as time allows.Elizabeth Chase is the Material Services Manager for the Frisco Public Library.
Elizabeth began her career with the City of Frisco in 2003. Before taking her current position, her roles at the Library included Adult Services Reference Librarian, Cataloger, and Senior Librarian.
In the category of “other duties as assigned,” Elizabeth is a member of the Frisco Lean Team Steering Committee, which develops and implements Lean certification for City employees. Her primary role is teaching a 4-hour Lean fundamentals class to employees throughout the City and celebrating the improvements made as a result.
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Find the blog post and the infographic
Written by Danielle Yoon, read by Mark Graban.
The post starts:
Manufacturers of all kinds seek to achieve continuous quality improvement because it ensures the consistency of products delivered to customers and protects against the competition. It also paves the path to compliance with industry-specific standards. This is crucial in the automotive sector because defective vehicle parts may lead to expensive recalls—or worse, accidents that cost lives.
Fortunately, continuous improvement has a long history in automotive manufacturing. Many of the tools and techniques widely used by organizations worldwide were explicitly developed to ensure the quality and efficiency of automotive manufacturing. Toyota was a pioneer of many of the CQI approaches used today. Whether you are using language like CQI, TQM, Lean, TPS, or Lean Six Sigma, these approaches described below still apply.
As you might imagine, the benefits of a successful continuous improvement program are significant, including:
6 Steps to Continuous Improvement in the Automotive Industry
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Welcome to the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Podcast. Today, we're excited to host Greg Jacobson, a lean thinker, and an inspiring visionary who has made significant strides in propagating the lean approach in the healthcare sector and beyond.
Learn more about KaiNexicon
In this captivating dialogue, Mark Graban helps unravel the remarkable journey of Greg, highlighting his deep-rooted dedication to continuous improvement that stretches back to his early days in his mother's tuxedo shop.
Unfolding the chapters of Greg's extraordinary journey, we learn about the inception of KaiNexus, which came to life from the chaos of email clutter, evolving to become a robust system that fosters improvement and efficiency. Greg's story serves as a testament to the far-reaching influence of a single individual's dedication to constant betterment, potentially catalyzing a revolution in the industry by propelling productivity and quality of care forward.
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Video, slides, and more
Presented by Tracy Defoe
How do you develop coaching skills in yourself and others? Why would you want to?
Everyone who manages people is asked to coach. Most of us think we are good at it. If you were lucky enough to learn how to develop and coach people because you were coached well from the start of your career, you are unusual. Most of us have to learn a new, quiet way of working with people to coach and develop them.
Join kata coach Tracy Defoe for her ideas on developing coaching skills the Toyota Kata way, based on years of personal and group experiential learning experiments.
This webinar is a preview of a deep dive Tracy is facilitating at the upcoming Kata Summit, KataCon10, coming up in April 2024.
Tracy Defoe is an adult educator specializing in learning at work. About ten years ago she started coaching to develop a scientific mindset in people improving their processes at work using the Improvement and Coaching Kata detailed in Mike Rother's Toyota Kata books. She is a cofounder of the global women's group Kata Girl Geeks, cofounder of Kata School Cascadia, and a facilitator with Tilo Schwarz's Kata Coaching Dojo Masterclass.
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Read the blog post
We often describe Kaizen as a way of looking at the world rather than a prescription for how to achieve positive change. Kaizen thinkers seek to make small changes to operations daily in search of higher quality, more efficiency, and less waste. But because the concept of Kaizen is so philosophical, it can be a challenge for people new to the idea to understand what it means in practical terms.
Related: What is Kaizen?
One useful tool for training managers to adopt the Kaizen mindset is called the 5 M’s. By consistently examining the 5 M’s, managers will be able to recognize when something in a process is not working and improve efficiency and profitability. This model can be used for risk mitigation, addressing safety issues, and improving quality. It can be used right alongside other Kaizen techniques such as the 5 Whys, 5S, and Gemba walks.
Humanpower Machines Materials Methods Measurements -
To be presented March 21 from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm ETThis is a quick preview where host Mark Graban, a senior advisor with KaiNexus, chats with webinar presenter Tracy Defoe.
Registration LinkWebinar Description:How do you develop coaching skills in yourself and others? Why would you want to?Everyone who manages people is asked to coach. Most of us think we are good at it. If you were lucky enough to learn how to develop and coach people because you were coached well from the start of your career, you are unusual. Most of us have to learn a new, quiet way of working with people to coach and develop them.Join kata coach Tracy Defoe for her ideas on developing coaching skills the Toyota Kata way, based on years of personal and group experiential learning experiments.This webinar is a preview of a deep dive Tracy is facilitating at the upcoming Kata Summit, KataCon10, coming up in April 2024.Tracy Defoe is an adult educator specializing in learning at work. About ten years ago she started coaching to develop a scientific mindset in people improving their processes at work using the Improvement and Coaching Kata detailed in Mike Rother's Toyota Kata books. She is a cofounder of the global women's group Kata Girl Geeks, cofounder of Kata School Cascadia, and a facilitator with Tilo Schwarz's Kata Coaching Dojo Masterclass.
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The blog post
Ecologists and other environmentally aware people often talk about the goal of "Zero Waste." But, of course, that's an outstanding goal for business as well.
Reducing waste is at the heart of the Lean business methodology. The purpose of Lean is to spend more of your time creating value for customers by reducing or eliminating everything that does not produce value (AKA the waste). Value can take the form of finished goods, services, or information. To make it easier to identify waste in business processes, Lean practitioners target eight specific types of waste.
Although the Lean approach originated in manufacturing, it is used in almost every sector. Strikingly the eight wastes are common across industries, including software development, construction, healthcare, and education. Although it is not as apparent as it may be on a factory floor, the set of tasks and activities performed in any sector creates a production process that ultimately provides value to a customer.
While some of the wastes are self-explanatory, others are more difficult to recognize. This post aims to help by giving a few examples of each type of waste in various businesses. Hopefully, they will help you think about how waste may be occurring in your operations and how to begin designing processes that minimize it. Of course, the people who are most likely to find and correct waste are the process operators, so it is a good idea to share these examples with them and provide a way for each employee to submit opportunities for improvement. -
The blog post
Companies dedicated to the practice of continuous improvement invest a lot of time and resources into training their employees and creating a culture centered around positive change. One way to make this easier and to smooth the path to improvement is to hire people who already have the right mindset.
Bringing up continuous improvement during the initial interview and throughout the hiring process lets the applicant know how important it is to your organization, and helps you weed out people who will be resistant to feedback and change.
If you ask the right questions, you can get a pretty good idea of whether the candidate is likely to be a good fit in your improvement culture and someone that the rest of the team will gladly welcome.
Here are some ideas of what to ask... - Show more
