Much of Lean is common sense – and LeanSkills is working to make it more common!

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.

5S is a tool to declutter, get organized, work more efficiently and stay that way. It is a simple tool that yields immediate and visible benefit and gains buy in from the team whether that be in the factory, the office or some other function.

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.

Change is all around us and indeed is being forced on us. Kaizen is about ‘good change’ and is something we need to implement in order to adapt, survive and even thrive in the current climate. Don’t just react to change. Drive change to improve your business.

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?