Applying A Systematic Approach To Any Field Is Challenging

A3s are an excellent way to communicate with your team members and other members of the organization. How many times have you picked up a piece of paper and spent much of your time figuring out how the information was organized? Once you did this, you then spent the rest of your time connecting the Read More …

What Customer Centric Really Means

Do you meet the criteria that successful customer-centric companies set? In this podcast, we explore this term and find out what it really means to be Customer Centric.  Author Bob Thompson, an international authority on customer-centric business management who has researched and shaped leading industry trends since 1998. Bob is founder and CEO of CustomerThink Read More …

Focus On The More Formal Deliverables

What would Dr. Deming Say? Dr. W. Edwards Deming advised us that a supplier is a partner and our relationships must be based on cooperation and trust. Adversarial relationships result in waste. Supplier relationships based on Dr. Deming’s teachings change fundamentally and, even better, both suppliers and customers win. Dr. Deming showed how customers and Read More …

Standardize & Leave People Be Creative

There seems to be as many maps in the Service Design world as there is time in the Lean world. Service Design has a few types of maps that they consider, Process Maps, Journey Maps, Blueprint Maps, Net-map, Offering Maps, Mind Maps, etc. Not that I don’t enjoy the tools but it gets rather confusing. Read More …

Process Maps, Value Maps and More Maps

Value Stream Mapping is a process most consider an exercise for finding and removing waste. It is a foundational Lean Tool that typically gets introduced early in a Lean Transformation. A Systems2win Excel template is depicted below: Value Steam Mapping is a powerful tool in the Lean arsenal but is far from the only kind Read More …

Value Stream Mapping: The Assessment and Planning Tool of Lean Practitioners

In the book,Value Stream Mapping for Lean Development: A How-To Guide for Streamlining Time to Market, Drew Locher explained how to create a Future State Map by utilizing seven basic questions: What does the customer really need? How often will we check our performance to customer needs? Which steps create value and which steps are Read More …