Category: Lean thinking
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.
Having practiced as a physician, I can’t do my work on a chart or in a lab – I have to see my patients up close. With a thorough history and physical, I can examine signs of the illness and eventually reach a diagnostic conclusion. Simply taking a patient’s pulse gives me an idea of the condition of his or her heart.
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.
While hosting a colleague and her husband for dinner last weekend, somehow the conversation drifted to the topic of strange pets people keep. My colleague’s spouse shared the hands-down winner, a story of an acquaintance – we’ll call her Kelly – who was so attached to her pet python that she slept in bed with it. Everything was going well until she noticed the snake had stopped eating. Concerned, she took the python to the vet, who told her why: Kelly’s bedfellow was starving itself for the big prey – her!
A few years ago, I was working with nurses, pharmacists and physicians to understand the chemotherapy administration process at a cancer center. They all had a common problem: Too many screens Way too many. As I observed a nurse as she was walking me through the process of activating a chemo treatment, I noticed she went through 19 screens as she toggled through the multiple systems to access all the information she needed to do her work.
In the lean world, this is described as “overprocessing” waste.