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Publisher’s Note: Seeing is Believing
Accelerated lean transformations, visionary lean leaders, and giving back to the community through lean are all explored in the Q4 issue of Managing Times. Anand Sharma will host the CEO Boot Camp in December. If you’re trying lean but not succeeding, if you are thinking about getting started but not certain if it’s worth the time or effort, or if you just want to benchmark your program against another, consider joining him for an inspirational, thought-provoking tour of outstanding lean organizations.
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Case Study: ConMed
Recently, a number of companies have decided to take an accelerated approach to their lean transformations, realizing that greater benefits will accrue more rapidly if they are willing to dive in deep from the start. ConMed is one such company. By combining leadership and commitment with clear objectives, discipline, and accountability; strong visual management that helps to maintain both sustainability and accountability; and dedicated people throughout the organization, ConMed has found the right ingredient mix to create the kind of results it seeks in order to be reliably responsive to its customers and remain a premier provider of medical and surgical devices. And it did so in record time.
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Strategic Visioning: Six Steps to Sensational
At the TBM Executive Exchange this past spring, the assembled company principles and owners agreed that they were focused on resizing and rebalancing their businesses as they dealt with the global economic recession. It’s possible to leverage the current economic climate to come out better in the future, and these are the six steps these leaders believed could help meet that goal.
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Special Feature: Amway and Kids’ Food Basket
When Amway’s Chris Wilson read a newspaper article about a local non-profit organization needing to move to a larger space, it occurred to him that NPOs could use lean to get more bang for their limited bucks. Kids’ Food Basket provides meals to children who otherwise would go without after the school day ends. A lean project team from Amway worked with KFB to increase efficiency and throughput, giving KFB the ability to grow its critical services by 30 percent this fiscal year, while remaining in the same location. Lean training and expertise from Amway has ensured that hundreds more children in Kent County, MI, won’t eat lunch as their last meal of the day.
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Tech Talk: Routing Standardization
Would you like to increase productivity by 50 percent, increase the ability to be on time with components to close to 100 percent, reduce your need for floor space, improve quality dramatically, reduce lead-time by 70 percent to 80 percent, and reduce your inventory substantially? Then routing standardization is the tool for you.
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Lean Champions: Pella’s Mel Haught
Pella’s President and CEO Mel Haught will retire in November. Haught’s commitment to lean manufacturing is probably his most important legacy at Pella. He not only produced incredibly consistent top line, bottom line, and cash flow results for Pella, but through his visionary leadership, he involved and empowered employees at all levels of the organization. As a result Pella has over many years been consistently voted by its employees to be one of the top 100 companies to work for in America in Fortune magazine’s survey.
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Field Note: Standard Work and Pace at Pella Corporation
The combination of standard work and some form of pace can deliver outstanding results, but it is important that the team is engaged and understands the true purpose of the tools. Most importantly, the team must not view them simply as tools, but more as a “way of life”. The two tools used in conjunction will help deliver positive results for your business.
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