Lean For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16

Real-Life Lean

In This Chapter

Studying Lean in Healthcare

Living kaizen in manufacturing

Improving employee on-boarding

In this chapter you learn about real-life examples of Lean in practice. You see Lean across several organizations in three industries — healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services. These stories include increasing laboratory throughput, maximizing consumer appointment capacity, operating room changeover, a high-tech assembly area’s first kaizen after a merger and on-boarding employees. In each case, a variety of Lean practices resulted in dramatic improvements in performance and customer satisfaction. Lean can be applied in many ways to any type of process in any industry — use these case studies as inspiration to improving all areas of your organization.

As you read these, you may have to adjust how you think about applying Lean concepts to your own processes. In this chapter, you see that “inventory” can be defined as available appointment times, and single minute exchange of die (SMED), a quick changeover technique (see Chapter 11), applies to the changeover of operating rooms. Both are direct applications of Lean techniques.

Improving Healthcare ...