The most successful way to look at unneeded business processes and their costs to the business is through a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) project. VSM provides a clear view of how various business processes are related to each other and assesses the need for those processes and how efficient they really are.

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Purchasing Best Practices were important to two supply chain optimization projects we recently completed for a University and a $400M manufacturer of consumer products. All companies purchase goods and services and have various organization structures, business processes and technology backbones for handling it.  In both projects, these were significantly different from each other. Irrespective …Read More

Kaizen is part of a Continuous Improvement strategy where stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees and contract workers) at every level work together to implement process improvements at the business level and on the shop floor.  These improvements may be …Read More

Here are some facts to consider when deciding to add the Brown Paper Exercise to a Value Stream Mapping Project:

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In Part V of the series on Driving Continuous Improvement, we discuss the importance of utilizing the right combination of Continuous Improvement tools. Once you have your program aligned with your business strategy and …Read More

The 5 Phases of Lean Deployment provides organizations who are looking to become world-class leaders in their industry a roadmap for getting there. When undertaking improvements, it is usually easy to establish the “what”: …Read More

Many people believe that Continuous Improvement is a culture.  It certainly is in the eyes of the Japanese and many others, but is continuous improvement really a culture or something else? …Read More

Healthcare performance improvement and healthcare performance management are intertwined and require a holistic approach to setting the right targets and accountabilities.  The complexity of all the things healthcare teams need to be good at makes this a daunting task when going it alone. Hospitals need to excel in these primary areas: …Read More

This case study describes how a healthcare consulting team of process improvement experts, utilizing Lean Techniques, were able to help a home healthcare provider improve annual profitability by $900K, reduce overtime by 50%, increase productivity by 10% and increase revenue by 3%. …Read More

The Internet of Everything: 8.4 billion and $2 trillion!  Those are the estimated number of connected ‘things’ on the internet and the amount spent on these devices and services by the end of 2017, according to a Gartner study.  The number of connected things is expected to …Read More