Category: MBOE

Fisher Senior Lecturer Mrinalini Gadkari is breaking down a recent week in the life of Fisher’s Master of Business Operational Excellence program. Stay tuned this week for more.  Lynn Kelley, VP of continuous improvement at Union Pacific, recently challenged students with two really interesting questions:

Fisher Senior Lecturer Mrinalini Gadkari is breaking down a recent week in the life of Fisher's Master of Business Operational Excellence program. Stay tuned this week for more. 

A friend of mine who’s a cardiothoracic surgeon at a renowned hospital in India emailed me with a problem. Here’s what he wrote: “The people at my hospital are motivated, hardworking and some are brilliant, too. But the processes are abysmal. It takes three days to discharge a patient after I actually decide to; an admission entails eight signatures across four buildings; and my wait list is 24 days to surgery after admission.”

It’s a busy time for gemba walks, folks. Fisher’s Master of Business Operational Excellence cohort recently spent time visiting Center for Operational Excellence members Nationwide Insurance and Cardinal Health. Meanwhile, MBOE’s health-care cohort met out in Seattle, visiting Seattle Children’s and Seattle GroupHealth, learning what role leaders take on in a lean environment. 

Imagine how a river becomes turbulent as it flows across rocks. A process in the same way can become inefficient or unpredictable due to the multiple roundabouts and rework we force our people to do while providing care to a patient or manufacturing a defect-free product for the customer.  What flows – the water – in a process are people, materials and information. Those rocks are waste, and our MBOE students in their latest on-campus session got a taste – no pun intended – of how it works.