Category: COE
Life brings bad problems and good problems, and the Center for Operational Excellence is happy to be right in the middle of a very, very good one.Tom Goldsby
Our good friends at the Cambridge, Mass.-based Lean Enterprise Institute are giving operational excellence junkies a chance this week to learn from a few masters this week – without leaving the office.
Any time I see a great lean process at a company or in real life, it looks so natural I’m shocked it wasn’t always that way. That’s probably why I had to read a recent Akron Beacon Journal article featuring Center for Operational Excellence member Akron Children’s Hospital twice before I saw the lean thinking behind the innovation.
Hanging around operations professors for a few months has made me realize I think entirely too little about the small wonders in my everyday life. In short, I’m starting to feel like I should take a moment of awed silence with my iPod Nano before I shuffle to my running mix and hustle down the street. The supply chain for even the simplest product out there (a bottle of water, for one) is really anything but.
Unlike my blog-posting colleague, I’m a relative newbie at lean, having spent my years out of college in the newspaper business and only recently making the jump to Fisher’s Center for Operational Excellence. I’ve pored over the Lean Enterprise Institute’s Lean Lexicon, scratched my head at A3s and learned very well how to nod politely at jargon as I scribble down mental notes for later. No amount of memorization, however, has taught me more about the transformative power of a lean approach than my first simulation.