The Lean Toolbox

[Latisha Gervase]

Toillustrate this point, consider kanban. It has been a major tool in many lean transformation efforts since the 1980s. The concept is pretty simple: A downstream process uses parts from an upstream process. As those parts are consumed, a piece of paper or kanban card is removed and sent back to the upstream process. When a predetermined number of cards is accumulated upstream, production may begin to replenish the stock used by the downstream process. Simple, right?

You can read about and understand the tools of lean in just about any quality management book. You can delegate the application and implementation to just about anyone--engineers, hourly workers, lean facilitators and the like. But you cannot succeed without internalizing the rules and principles of lean throughout all of management--using that thinking to guide not just the implementation, but daily decision making, problem-solving and managing.

Andon--The ability for an operator to pull a cord that triggers a horn and light which tells the team leader or supervisor that he or she needs help or support. Once provided, the team leader can pull the cord to keep production moving.

Visual management--Both a tool and a concept. The ideal state is that all employees, operators and managers should be able to manage every aspect of the process at a glance, using visual data, signals and guides.

Introduced by Dan Jones, co-author of Lean Thinking, this guide to lean management includes sections on lean philosophy and waste, planning, design, mapping, improvement, production, the Goldratt principles, quality, suppliers, people and measurement. Each section's topics provide brief overviews in the style of its companion volume "The Quality 60".

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Many organizations struggle to implement Lean and to use the Lean toolbox in the way that best suits their unique situation. Avoiding common pitfalls in Lean transformations saves money, time and nerves.

The Lean toolbox is a set of methods and tools that help to implement Lean principles such as value flow, pull, waste elimination and continuous improvement in practise. Lean methods vary in terms of their implementation complexity, key benefits and impact areas. Simple and visual methods bring the team quickly onto the same page. The toolbox creates a common framework for operations development.

For example, the value stream mapping Lean tool includes step-by-step instructions, visualization icons and process calculation logic. It can help e.g. to streamline an orthopaedic patient care process by focusing on activities that bring value to the customer, like the knee surgery procedure does, while minimizing waste such as queuing for an operation.

The personnel also need to be engaged in cross-functional process development, since it creates a wealth of improvement ideas and helps in adapting to change. Lean development needs to be started with focused efforts to gain quick wins that will also inspire others to commence their Lean endeavours. Wisely used, a Lean toolbox paves the way for a successful Lean transformation.

In the total organization is people that touch the products we build, which trust and understand these powerful tools. Then there are the support functions such as Finance, Human Resources, Engineering and Program Management. These are separate parts of our internal organization requiring a different message. The focus being improvement and vigilance an organized and method specific controlled process that tightens the outputs.

Then we have our product customers. They want results and evidence of full organization buy in. Why - elimination of waste and belief for centers of excellence. The realization as we peal the onion on this application for our toolbox is, we are good/great now however we are not done and will continue to use our Lean/Six sigma tools in order to be the best- center of excellence.

The Lean/Six Sigma processes we are promoting too all customers, internal and external, is like a Rock. The old prophecy that a rock rolling down hill cant grow moss is really applicable in this instance. This Rock known as the Process will always role so there can be no moss that grows on this style organization. This is the symbol that is visual to resemble we will always improve using our tools to maintain control. This control reflects all matrix items and more specifically both quality and cost. The results are an alignment with all the customers.

In summary the huge toolbox we have trained on needs to still have proper presentation to our customers both internal and external customers. The true results are a center of excellence aligned with the whole internal organization and its external customers.

N2 - Refurbishment projects notably for social housing are special kinds of project for many reasons, including inflexible existing stock, low available budgets, involvement of residents staying in their homes during construction. Lean tools could be helpful not only during construction, but also in the preparation of projects including requirements definition, budgeting, design, engineering and planning. The preparation phase also has typical peculiarities including political and social aspects, and is often time and cost consuming. Much lean research has focussed on improving the construction of new built and private sector projects. In contrast this paper aims to demonstrate the merits of lean tooling in the preparation phase of social housing refurbishments. The research reported examined lean tooling applications and their effects on project success in selected case studies of social housing refurbishments in the Netherlands. The research was a design based action research shaping a preselected catalogue of tools i.e. lean toolbox. Next tools were selected together with practitioners, for application in the case projects. After those interventions interviews were held to registers effects on critical success factors in the projects. Most of the tool applications from the lean toolbox approach appeared to be effective in harnessing critical success factors in the projects.

AB - Refurbishment projects notably for social housing are special kinds of project for many reasons, including inflexible existing stock, low available budgets, involvement of residents staying in their homes during construction. Lean tools could be helpful not only during construction, but also in the preparation of projects including requirements definition, budgeting, design, engineering and planning. The preparation phase also has typical peculiarities including political and social aspects, and is often time and cost consuming. Much lean research has focussed on improving the construction of new built and private sector projects. In contrast this paper aims to demonstrate the merits of lean tooling in the preparation phase of social housing refurbishments. The research reported examined lean tooling applications and their effects on project success in selected case studies of social housing refurbishments in the Netherlands. The research was a design based action research shaping a preselected catalogue of tools i.e. lean toolbox. Next tools were selected together with practitioners, for application in the case projects. After those interventions interviews were held to registers effects on critical success factors in the projects. Most of the tool applications from the lean toolbox approach appeared to be effective in harnessing critical success factors in the projects.

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This page contains the outputs of the The Lean Toolbox webinar that took place on 22nd February 2023. The session introduced the sixth edition of The Lean Toolbox book by John Bicheno and Matthias Holweg and included a series of polls for participants that addressed issues and challenges relating to the book and its previous editions.

The recording of the session includes John and Matthias's learned comments on each of the poll results. The winners of the prize draw for a copy of The Lean Toolbox are listed at the foot of the page.

The LCS is a lean qualifications framework used by accredited organisations to support lean training programmes, facilities or academies and by employees and lean practitioners as a vehicle to develop lean thinking knowledge and practical skills. There are seven levels in the framework, grouped into three categories 1) Fundamental, 2) Technical and 3) Strategic, covering the entire spectrum of lean knowledge and practice.

Aaron Hunt is the Director of Performance Improvement at Washington Health System. He has over 20 years experience coaching and implementing lean in a wide range of industries, including electronics, heavy power, medical devices, and railway systems. Starting with traditional assembly line experience and mentoring at Sony Electronics, Aaron has also applied lean principles in machine shops, injection molding operations, assembly cells, product design, software engineering, and healthcare environments. He has been fortunate to teach, coach, and experience lean in several countries along his personal lean journey.

My whole career, I have worked with the Lean methodology (aka the Toyota Production System). I've just really never done much with Six Sigma. I've read about Six Sigma and I took a Green Belt course when I worked at Dell in the late 90s. I've studied and used statistical methods (especially what I learned in my Industrial Engineering studies and at MIT), but I've never done anything I would call Six Sigma in my career.

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