Process Improvement Junkie
Todd Hudson's Maverick Thinking on Improving Speed, Quality, Safety and Costs
How I Became a Process Improvement Junkie
Okay, I admit it. I am a process improvement junkie. In fact, I’m proud of it. I’ve been seeing waste and improving things my entire life.
Audio Only: Todd’s ‘Learning at the Speed of Lean’ Workshop at ATD Puget Sound
In October 2017 in Seattle I facilitated a Lean Knowledge Transfer workshop called 'Learning at the Speed of Lean' at ATD Puget Sound’s fall learning event. I split the attendees into teams and taught them how to use three Lean principles and tools to analyze and...
Mindful Habits for 7 Lean Practices
Todd's Been Awfully Quiet Lately. What's He Been Up to? Well, one of several really cool things I’ve been doing in 2018 is writing my new ebook, Mindful Habits for 7 Lean Practices (another thing I've been up to is applying Lean to EH&S and research laboratories,...
Don’t Be Scared Away From Lean
As you can imagine, I’m on a lot of mailing lists and social media groups about Lean and see it described and talked about in many ways. Recently, some of these have been really over the top and, quite frankly, do a disservice. Headlines like “Improvement Through...
To Continuously Improve, Study Your Results
Woohoo! You’ve just launched a new training program and rolled it out to the organization. Time for high fives, right? Not so fast… If you’ve been learning about Lean, you know that all problem solving activities are guided by the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, in...
Lean Frees Improvement
Force field analysis is a fantastic change management tool. It also beautifully encapsulates the difference between Lean and traditional improvement approaches. A force field analysis diagram looks like this: Force field analysis is useful whenever you want to improve...
Funnel Lean Savings in More Customer Value (NOT Lower Prices)
People focus too much on Lean as a way to reduce costs. Yes, that’s frequently one result, but Lean, at its core, is about creating more customer/patient value. Show ‘Em the LUV The perfect example is Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV). You’ll never see the word ‘Lean’ on...
Lean is Hope (But Not Like This)
Lean is hope, but not in the sense of ‘I hope things get better.’ That’s hope as powerlessness. Lean is powerful. I got thinking about this after writing my post The Road to Lean, Part 2: Improvement Cultures. Different improvement approaches create different business...
Cutting Out Waste (or Cutting Your Own Throat)?
In an earlier post, Small Wastes Get Big Quickly, my Lean Waste Calculator showed you how the minutes that employees are forced to waste to accomplish work quickly turn into thousands of hours for the organization as a whole. These equate to full-time employees NOT...
Focus on Value (Sales), Not Bureaucracy (Returns)
My recent experience returning a pair of shoes to Nordstrom was a perfect example of a company understanding my blog post, Small Wastes Get BIG Quickly. Nordstrom doesn’t actually have a formal return policy. Here’s what they say on their website about returns and...
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