Category: Operations
A new survey on operations management in U.S. middle-market companies shows them uniquely positioned to make sustainable process improvements but still trailing their larger peers in developing formal implementation programs.
A Columbus Dispatch story this week on The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s new emergency department set to open this weekend includes a few discouraging statistics on the operation’s current state.
Even the best organizations don’t see outside their four walls sometimes, and those in search of the big picture often turn to value-stream mapping.
As a tool in the lean transformation arsenal, value-stream mapping is a tried-and-true approach to finding bottlenecks, redundancies and other problems in the product or service’s journey to the end customer. What far too few companies realize, however, is that value-stream mapping can be a great catalyst for changing leadership behavior to support and sustain a lean culture.
John Gray
by Steve Lundregan
I spent more than 30 years with a large insurance company, and during my tenure our leadership spent a great deal of time on “how:” How to execute, how to sell, how to get better, how to manage IT.
One thing we rarely did, though, was ask why we were in business – and when we did, it was usually for the annual board strategy session, when conversations were more rhetorical than real and limited to a few strategic players.