Lean / Six Sigma

What Safety Incidents Say About Your Organization

An organization’s record of safety incidents represents more than a measure of how cautious its employees are in high risk environments or with high risk materials. This metric also directly corresponds to an organization’s values, management philosophy and priorities, employee engagement and culture as well as productivity (cost, quality, delivery) issues.

 

Isolated incidents aside, the recurrence of unsafe practices is not simply a story of individual or human error specifically. […]

By |Continuous Improvement, Culture, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Lean / Six Sigma, Safety|
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Speaking At Lean Systems Summit

 If you’re interested in learning more about why Continuous Improvement doesn’t stick (and getting it to) check out my session at the Lean Systems Summit: Conflict Is The Root Of All Waste

 

I’ll be speaking on August 8th and would love to meet up if you plan on attending. 

 

Check out the event overview here.

 

Check out the post event comments and presentation here.

 

 

 

By |Continuous Improvement, Culture, Employee Engagement, Lean / Six Sigma, Performance, Productivity, Waste|
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Funding for Employee Training

If budget prevented you from attending our last Fundamentals of Change workshop good news: For qualified organizations, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development (EOLWD) will grant up to half the cost of this training through their Express program.The EOLWD believes in FCC’s impact on the leadership and team building skills necessary to drive change and performance. Approved companies could get funding to kick off training in […]

By |Change Management, Continuous Improvement, Leadership Development, Lean / Six Sigma, Operations, Performance, Productivity|
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The Point of Continuous Improvement

Happy Friday! This is an oldie but goodie. A funny reminder that at the end of the day, CI efforts should focus on improving the means by which the business interprets and meets the needs of its customers. The impact of this effort is strongly enhanced by first taking the time to figure out what your customers want and expect. When was the last time you conducted a Voice […]

By |Culture, Employee Engagement, Lean / Six Sigma, Mission, Performance, Values, Vision|
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Poor Performance Is Often About Poor Process

Cuts in headcount are too often made with short term goals in mind. Somehow those with traditional management views consider this among the easier tacts to take when looking at cutting costs. I will grant them that it is one of the faster solutions in that regard. I would hope that these layoffs represent a last resort for Levis Strauss. I imagine that if they are truly experiencing a […]

By |Business Model, Culture, Employee Engagement, Lean / Six Sigma, Process Optimization, Productivity, Service Operations, Waste|
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    What keeps organizations from cultivating a Continuous Improvement culture

What keeps organizations from cultivating a Continuous Improvement culture

Mark Graban gets to the heart of what keeps organizations from cultivating a CI culture – lack of organizational alignment and commitment:

 
“The problem is many (if not most) of these Lean initiatives are completely project-based or rely on top-down decisions, missing the opportunity for truly continuous improvement that engages each employee and leader – “Kaizen”.”
 

Mark’s tips on how to make it happen.

By |Culture, Lean / Six Sigma|
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Getting Past Lean’s Bad Rap

For better or worse, organizations that experience performance pain tend to feel the burn most acutely in Operations. Macresco is often brought in to assess the damage and charged with conceiving of the “Lean” remedy executive management (misguidedly) believes will put an end to their troubles. It is at this point where my uphill battle begins. I’m either battling leadership on the purpose and application of Lean or management […]

By |Employee Engagement, Lean / Six Sigma, Operations, Performance, Process Optimization, Productivity|
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Why Continuous Improvement Doesn’t Stick

Lean and Six Sigma methodologies both hinge on getting to the root cause of an issue as a means of addressing performance. Generally speaking, this approach reveals significant opportunities to improve productivity by way of more streamlined processes.

Sooner or later, however, the same issues Continuous Improvement (CI) initiatives were implemented to fix, crop up again. I believe it is because the true root cause driving this operational pain isn’t […]

By |Communication Skills, Culture, Employee Engagement, Lean / Six Sigma, Operations, Organizational Development|
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