Sustain a Lean Culture, use Lean Tools

I worked the Systems2win booth this week at the AME Conference in Dallas, TX. I enjoy the opportunity tremendously as I get to spend a great deal of time with hundreds of Lean Practitioners in a variety of positions and industries. Discussing the Systems2win word and excel continuous improvement templates offers me the opportunity to revisit many of the basic Lean principles.

You need leadership and a mindset or cultural shift in a Lean Transformation but I support the thinking that most of us use tools to learn and sustain improvement efforts. If we are unable to use the tools, we can’t implement. I use the analogy that a carpenter becomes a carpenter by becoming proficient with a hammer. You become proficient with Lean by using Value stream Mapping, Standard Work and the others.

I stray away from some of the traditional tools of Lean as a result of my work in sales and marketing. Spending the time in the booth discussing the breadth (there are over 150 templates) of Lean foundational tools that Systems2win supplies was for me a refresher course. It re-cemented the practical applications of Lean to standard work (no pun attended). Lean is firmly rooted in accomplishing work. It is not about creating elaborate control structures. It is simply about learning by doing and how better to accomplish that but through the use of the tools.

After coming home, I looked through a few of the Systesm2win templates on YouTube to strengthen that learning. I have included the Introduction to Value Stream Mapping.

I found that taking a Value Stream Mapping project off of a board and documenting it on software besides the obvious attributes of archiving and sharing, it creates, distributes and reinforces the knowledge of the process and the use of the mapping process for other projects.