December Meeting: Lean and Green with Jeff McAuliffe

PNODN Lean & Green.ppt 

Summary

The meeting began with announcements and networking. Jeff posted topics for the attendees to vote their top three interests. (Images coming soon). To start of the topic, Jeff presented his Principals of Improvement, the Lean concepts of "value" and "the 8 wastes" and provided examples of the tools used in a typical lean process improvement workshop. 

Jeff compared and contrasted various quality programs top companies use (CQI, TQM) when reviewing his principals of improvement. He shared the challenges of helping people understand value from the customers perspective and waste as not value added work. Value-added activity is generally any thing that changes the form, fit or function of a thing and it is important to ground the definition with the customers perspective. A very small percentage of work is value-added activity. 

The wastes are insidious in that lead to more waste, like whenever you have a lot of space it tends to get filled up with stuff then you have inventory. Or when work is over-processed it leads to waits and delays in other areas, like decisions that go up stairs for no reason, or unnecessarily sorting of material consuming time. Jeff cited The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking as reading to explore for more Lean concepts and applications of quality improvement then talked about Lean tools like spaghetti diagrams and process maps and the importance of both qualitative and quantiative data. When sharing a chart called a "process footprint" depicting the cost of a process he made an analogy to a carbon footprint. (This ties back to the October meeting with Travis Green.) 

Sharing stories from Swedish, Boeing other organizations, McAuilffe discussed cross functional teamwork and challenging process owners about why they do what they do. He explained that because the structure of organizations is complex with processes running horizontal and functional vertical skilled facilitation a necessary part of the work. Later, he explained that the problems of sponsorship and measuring impact of change are the same in Lean as in any OD work. To the question "Is lean green?", Jeff shared that there are two schools of thought.

Those topics....