Building Better Businesses

Thousands of organizations are taking steps to improve productivity, efficiency and profitability following the methods pioneered by Toyota. Applying these methods requires a different way of thinking – lean thinking.

Change we can believe in? Don’t believe it. That’s not a knock on our new president, who based his entire campaign on change.

March, a plastics manufacturer in Henderson, Kentucky hosted weeklong Lean Systems Bootcamp facilitated by KAM member, Institute for Lean Systems (ILS). The company had recently been purchased and partially consolidated by the news owners who were intent on returning this struggling manufacturing operation to profitability.

David Veech knows that life is supposed to be hard for start ups. But for The Institute for Lean Systems, it didn’t happen that way.

Enterprise strategy, said he decided after high school in his native Germany “that different cultures were an interesting field of study, so I became an anthropologist.”

Advocates of the lean business model make a big deal about eliminating waste, but for most companies that is too narrow a focus.

In 2008, Americans spent more than $2.4 trillion on health care, according to The National Coalition on Health Care. Some industry experts estimate that $600 billion or more of that money was wasted due to delay, defects and other inefficiencies.

Despite a national unemployment rate approaching double digits, many manufacturers are still having trouble finding skilled workers. The New York Times recently reported that it took one company 18 months to hire 80 experienced welders for an oil-refinery project in Maine.