Developing people means challenging people. But just issuing challenges isn't enough. You must also teach a systematic, common means of creating solutions and meeting those challenges.

Creating a positive workplace is critical to a company's success. Most people who have experience working in an office have seen firsthand the difference between one that has a positive environment and one that doesn't. A positive work environment has a better productivity rate, happier workers overall, better morale, and a lower turnover rate.

Cool video on Continuous Improvement

Pay attention to the critical benefit here: everyone has agreed that email is NOT to be used for urgent or complex issues. This agreement really is significant, because it unshackles people from their BlackBerries during meetings, or product development work, or strategic planning. Or their kids' soccer games. Or dinner. Or sex. Which means that there's now a fighting chance to have some uninterrupted time to, you know, think.

A client and fellow lean learner today shared a cool extension of the Toyota Kata model for establishing target conditions

Our simulations today brought our change over time down to 4 minutes 1 second. We started at 29 minutes. The team accomplished this by simply preparing the items that were needed for the next run. The change will save approximately 8 hours per month!

Not bad for TGBs first CI Event. Nice work by Pieter Vervloessem, Matthisas Marivoet, Johan Van Calster, Anja Van Hoorebeeck, and Dominica Moons.

Today we changed the dwell time on TGB's kitting line and we able to save a little over 1 second per kit. Nice experimenting by the team to change the setting from 150 down to 35.

After observing and categorizing a 29+ minute change over process we realized that at least 14 minutes of it can be do while the previous job is still running. Tomorrow we start experimenting & simulating! I think we can get this below 10 minutes!

Pieter V. did a nice job of facilitating!

We should try this. Any takers?

This may be a great tool to use in the planned Kaizen on Planning/PM documentation.

Visual control in the Shipping Dept.

A work order control board.

Who has the Shift Summary Report?

The waste of searching reduced.

Spiral Binding in POD

Simple visual to determine status of the workplace.

Great Kaizen in the POD Area

The Laws of Subtraction provide insights and lessons towards removing the clutter and honing in on the essence in order to awaken the creativity and innovation that generally gets buried under a deluge of non-essential information. Through a series of excellent stories that serve as examples for his laws in action, May highlights the unique features of these laws and their applicability to everyday life, both professional and personal

As you facilitate lean improvement events, I hope the distillation from a few recent experiences below benefit you as they have me

A couple of great visuals from the Program Management Dept.

Good team effort to come up with this one.