From the category archives:

5S

Book Review: Clinical 5S for Healthcare

by Pete Abilla August 14, 2010

Akio Takahara is the leading lean practitioner and expert on the 5S support system in Healthcare. In his book, he claims that 5S in Healthcare will do the following: Reduce human errors Prevent patient accidents Eliminate the waste of searching Better utilize available work space Increase patient and colleague satisfaction It’s very refreshing to see [...]

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Do Not Do 5S – Yet

by Pete Abilla August 12, 2010

I’ve never understood why most organizations start their Lean journey with 5S. Most consultants advocate this approach also. I take a different view. In an earlier post, Jamie Flinchbaugh argues that organizations shouldn’t begin their Lean journey with 5S for the following reasons: If your first step in Lean is one that involves mandates, it [...]

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Poka-Yoke Pharmaceuticals

by Pete Abilla August 17, 2009

King Pharmaceutical (NYSE: KG) recently had a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Their drug, Embeda, has an interesting property: If you take the medication as prescribed, it works fine; if you abuse the medication, it ceases to work.  This is Poka-Yoke (ポカヨケ) for Pharmaceutical drugs. Poka-Yoke (ポカヨケ), translated, means mistake-proof, or [...]

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Maintain Forward Tension

by Pete Abilla July 20, 2008

One principle in Wing Chun is the maintaining of forward tension.  To explain, I’ll draw the distinction between Tension and Energy and show how this principle in Wing Chun can be applied to Change Management. Tension is a type of Energy A Wing Chun maxim goes as follows: soft and relaxed strength will put your [...]

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Fast Food Congestion

by Pete Abilla July 9, 2008

Every system has constraints — sometimes several — minor bottlenecks and major bottlenecks.  What makes managing constraints even more challenging is that bottlenecks move: up-and-down the process paths. I saw this phenomenon recently during a visit to a fast food restaurant, which I discuss in this post — but, my application of the Theory of [...]

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Necessary but Insufficient

by Pete Abilla June 7, 2008

Motorola (MOT), the inventor of Six Sigma, is in big trouble. Even though it invented Six Sigma, this is a clear example that shows how Lean or Six Sigma are not a cure-all for corporate woes, but that good leadership and a winning strategy are key in a competitive world — Lean or Six Sigma [...]

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Visual Mismanagement

by Pete Abilla March 12, 2008
This entry is part 8 of 9 in the series Visual Management Principles

A few months ago we adopted our baby girl, Mylie.  During that hospital experience, I had an encounter with a faucet fraught with featuritis and one that wasn’t humane and, during that same time, I noticed a piece of visual management in the hospital room that wasn’t effective in its intention to provide or share [...]

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Burden on People; Burden on Earth

by Pete Abilla February 7, 2008

On average, most business processes are inefficient  and create an unhealthy amount of waste: once you learn to see the process waste all around — with Lean Thinking as your worldview — you will notice overprocessing, transportation, overproduction, waiting, inventory, motion, and defects.  Aside from our processes producing waste, our processes also create burden on [...]

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Visual Management and Self-Reliance

by Pete Abilla January 25, 2008

One of my primary goals in life is to teach my kids to be eventually good, productive, and self-reliant adults.  One area of life-skills that my wife and I are focused on in teaching our children, is teaching them the principle of work: how to work, the value of work, to take ownership over their [...]

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