Mapping out what is value and what is waste is essential in these crisis times; eliminating waste can reduce your carbon footprint and improve your balance sheet; analysing the root cause of down-time and minimising time wasting can add dollars to your bottom line.

Many people have heard of Lean tools such as Six Sigma, Value Stream Mapping, 5S, Just in Time, Kanban, Poka Yoka, Heijunka and Kaizen. But many are also discouraged by the jargon, confused by the Japanese phrases and intimidated by the statistical focus and ‘black belts’ of Six Sigma.

The LeanSkills Essentials for Managers will help cut through all these barriers. It provides a no-nonsense review of the Lean tools and where and when to use them. It also takes a practical approach to developing a Lean strategy – selecting the right tools, making the business case, providing leadership and generating team buy in to the Lean culture change.

See the Seminar Program page for more information.

Do you spend half your time solving the same problems that you thought you fixed yesterday?

Do you spend your time solving problems that others should be solving?

You need Root Cause Analysis (RCA)!

The LeanSkills Root Case Intensive will explore a number of simple but powerful problwm solving techniques that lead to the problem staying solved.

But wait, there’s more! These techniques will hwlp you teach others to solve problems - freeing you to do what you should be doing.

And there’s still MORE! The intensive also looks at techniques not only to build the problem solving capacity of your team but to increase their willingness to do so.

See the Seminar Program page for more information.

5S has been the starting point for many organisations on the lean journey as it helps practice the basics of identifying waste, standardising work practices and making improvements - while achieving runs on the board. But you do need to do all 5 of them to ensure sustained improvements.

The LeanSkills program includes a ‘5S intensive’ which shows how to identify, plan, apply and continually improve your 5S projects. See the Seminar Program page for more information.

Effective green activities can range from inexpensive behaviour improvements, such as reducing energy use by turning off lights that are not needed, through to technological research and development to achieve better efficiency. Lean is a structured system for identifying waste and improving efficiency – so it provides a tailor-made set of concepts and tools for going green.

You can use the Lean tools ‘5S’ and ‘Kaizen blitz’ in short, sharp projects to get rid of unused items and reduce consumption of energy/materials. But you can also ensure you get sustained improvements across productivity KPIs, Operational Equipment Efficiency, product improvements and efficient work systems using tools such as Value Stream Mapping, Kaizen, Theory of Constraints and process re-engineering.

Looking at the ’seven deadly wastes’ improves your capacity to deliver what your customer values and is prepared to pay for with less investment in things which the customer does not value. This allows you to trim price, increase margins or both!

The LeanSkills intensive will give you the skills to identify what really goes on and how much it is really costing.

Kaizen is often translated as meaning continuous improvement and this may mean having the ‘shop floor’ come up with and implement small, seemingly inconsequential good changes each day, every day.

But even a 0.1% improvement every day is over 20% a year. And it is compound!

Where do you get it?

How do you do it?

Often howver, continuous improvement won’t break the intractable problems. For these you need breakthrough improvement (often called kaizen blitz) – a three day to one week intensive program to deliver that step change to solve that intractable problem.

How do you set it up?

How do you run it?