Kaizen is a Japanese term that refers to a continuous improvement approach that is incremental and iterative that was developed as part of the Toyota Production System in the 1940's. Since it's introduction, the Kaizen method has been adopted by various industries and even by competitors. A recent article from The Wall Street Journal highlights the need and success of Kaizen by Subaru to keep up with increased demands on production. With each round of Kaizens, Subaru is able to improve on efficiency and output. The idea is that the sum of every small improvement will yield a significant impact.
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Large companies suffer from what’s known as big business bloat. With each added process there is unintentionally added complexity and variability that ultimately affects cycle times, service levels, scalability, capacity, compliance, and defects among other things. In some estimates, complexity is attributable for as much as 15 – 30% of large business costs. This article from the WSJ written by Deloitte further explains how these process variations and potential savings are greatly underestimated by executives.
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So I stumbled on this show which premiered 12/30/15 on Discovery GO. Extreme Time Cheaters is a reality TV show about people who go to extreme and unusual lengths to save time in their days thereby optimizing their time and in a roundabout way also cheating death.
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What is it?
Simply put, Kanban is a visual management tool originating from Toyota in the 1940's that was developed to improve production throughput by aligning resources with demand. In it's most basic form a Kanban board tracks items using three columns: To do, In progress and Completed as depicted in the example above. The simple nature and ease of interpretation of the Kanban tool allows it to be used in a variety of settings to organize and track countless tasks. Of course, both the Kanban cards and board can be customized to add more processing steps and details as required.
The following are two examples of Kanban being used at work and at home:
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The principles of Lean Six Sigma can be applied in all different types of scenarios and industries, from automotive to healthcare. Recently, Lean Six Sigma was used in a collaborative effort from The Joint Commission’s Center for Transforming Healthcare and the American College of Surgeons (ACS) for Reducing Colorectal Surgical Site Infections (SSI).
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