Category: MBOE

Students in Fisher’s Master of Business Operational Excellence cohort kicked off their first day with an introduction to value-stream mapping by Gary Butler, an executive in residence in the Management Sciences department. After a good discussion about what value is and who the customer is, Gary gave students a handy acronym, TIM WOOD, to remember the “seven deadly wastes” in any process: Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Wait, Overproduction, Over-processing and Defect.

Barb Bouche, an MBOE coach and director of process improvement at Seattle Children's Hospital, told students at this week's session that she began exploring the option of applying Toyota Production principles to the hospital a few years ago. She met with resistance from the organization, the argument being, "Patients are not cars." Shortly afterwards she happened to cross paths with some people from Boeing. They told her during their lean journey the argument they commonly heard was, "Airplanes are not cars!"

Excitement is high this week at the Fisher College of Business as we launch the first cohort of our MBOE Healthcare Program. MBOE, by the way, stands for Master of Business Operational Excellence, a program we introduced three years ago with a group of students mostly from the manufacturing and service industries. In the last cohort, however, we noticed nearly half of the students were from the health-care sector – and what we did about it is this very program.

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.