Lean Transformations and Culture Change
To grow, an enterprise needs to marshal its resources efficiently and engage its employees.
We work with leadership to develop strategies that use kaizen events and on-site training to establish a lean culture that leads to substantially increased process throughput and more relaxed and engaged employees.
These engagements are typically inch-wide-mile-deep five-day kaizen events that proceed department by department until they have covered the entire enterprise. Engagements occur over several months, at the rate of about once per six weeks.
The vast majority of our engagements fall under this format.
Lean Green Belt & Black Belt Certification & Training
Green Belt and Black Belt classes leading to certification are conducted at the University of Nevada, Reno twice a year. They take five days, usually one Thursday or Friday per week for five weeks.
An actual student problem, picked by popular vote, is solved in class and the results are followed-up on as the class progresses.
Certification training can also be conducted on-site at a client with the University of Nevada, Reno certificate granted to qualifying students. The timetable for this training can be more flexible, perhaps occurring over five consecutive days rather than over five weeks.
Stand-Alone Kaizen Events
In Japanese, kai means change and zen means good, so kaizen is a good change.
A kaizen event takes place over a week with an existing process being re-developed from scratch and stood back up to work the following Monday. There are usually follow-up items, communications, forms, etc., that are completed as part of a 90-day roadmap. After 90 days the to-do list is scrapped, freeing people from the burden of that which cannot be quickly achieved.
Solutions are arrived at in collaboration with the client team. Common business process and manufacturing process issues tackled include inventory, change-over time, order velocity, scheduling and storage.
Most of our lean transformation clients start with a single kaizen event.