Author Archive

Jean Cunningham: Poka Yoke in an administrative process By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster' - Last updated: Wednesday, August 4, 2010

After introducing the concept of Jidoka, specifically the element of poke yoke or mistake proofing, a kaizen team came up the following improvement: At the hospital, when an employee goes on worker's compensation, their pay is no longer via payroll system, but though worker's compensation insurance provider. However, the supervisors, who did not have experience with this very often (thank goodness!) where unclear about whether they should put the employees' hours in the payroll system as sick time, or as unworked time. Previously this problem was supposed to be avoided based on education; but that wasn't working well. Education of rules rarely works when you have to apply the ...

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Jean Cunningham: Flow works for marketing as well By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster' - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

What could be worse than developing a great marketing plan with a very timely message, then spending all your time pushing the project through the company,only to find the key dates slipping by and ultimately missing the opportunity? To compensate, we plan the new marketing approaches months and months in advance and the message is not integrated with other selling activities.  What if instead you could have a cross functional meeting of all the key contributors to look at the existing process for delivering a marketing program, eliminate steps in the process that are not adding value to delivering the message, and reduce the time from concept to ...

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Jean Cunningham: Stop Rewarding Firefighting! By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster' - Last updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010

One way to support a "opportunity culture" is to stop rewarding firefighting.  Instead of performance reviews discussing specific objectives and challenges overcome, target more on lack of crisis and even flow.  I remember discussing with a manager the performance review of a cell leader that described him as not being "action oriented" and "lacking leadership skills."  I had actually managed this person before and it did not fit with my experience.  What we determined was the new manager was expecting to see more heroics and had not really thought about the fact that the cell under this leader's guidance had steadily improved all the key metrics and had developed ...

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Jean Cunningham: A war story By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster' - Last updated: Thursday, June 3, 2010

Monday I was at a Memorial Day cook out (where else!).  I met a guy who does systems consulting and was telling me how he was into process improvement. His firm had hired this “crazy” guy who was into lean. He went into the client and showed them how they could get all the work for a process (I think it was entering orders) done in one and half day for the entire country by creating a flow line.  Each job had standard work and they paced the flow based on the printer sound which was ...

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