05/28/10 by Ankit Patel | lean culture, stress and productivity |

For Every $1 U.S. companies get back from employees skipping vacations, they lose as much as $7 in costs related to worker burnout. Source: Go Away, Just for the health of it by Dr. Mel Borins For those of you working this weekend you may want to consider turning off…

05/17/10 by Ankit Patel | lean, lean culture, Nashville TN, Skyline Medical Center |

I saw this sign a few days ago and it caught my attention. The sign tells you how long the ER wait time is at Skyline Medical Center in Nashville TN (click on the link to see their current wait times on their website). The basic idea is that every…

04/18/10 by Ankit Patel | company culture, increase sales, lean culture, motivating employees, save money |

When running a business there a a whole list of issues. No matter what industry you are in there are some common themes: motivating employees, increase sales, and save money all without money. Many people think that these are all independent and not related but there is a common underlining…

04/15/10 by Ankit Patel | continuous improvement, lean culture, thinking thursday, veterinary clinic |

Often times in the business world we want to hit the home run. Heck at every company I worked at there were awards for hitting “home runs!” But what about all the base hits and sacrifice fly balls? I’m not trying to confuse the business world with baseball but the…

04/12/10 by Ankit Patel | lean culture, line design |

So you want to “be Lean” but not really sure what that means? There are two parts to the “being Lean.” 1) The physical changes like line design (20%)2) The culture of you company (80%) I’ve talked at length about cultural importance and how to change your companies culture (previous…

11/04/09 by Ankit Patel | lean culture, lean manufacutring, the lean way consulting, usa today |

I came across this great article in the USA Today on how Lean is helping manufacturing companies survive the recession. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2009-11-01-lean-manufacturing-recession_N.htm?csp=34 It’s pretty simple. Get rid of waste, empower your people, and keep changing to get better and you have a winning formula. Now thats a bit easier said then…

10/30/09 by Ankit Patel | lean, lean culture, lean manufacutring, the lean way consulting |

Many companies have already started lean but I think many people might ask “Are we lean?” You might measure “being lean” on how much waste is removed. To be truly lean 100% of the waste form a process has to be removed and the reality is that there will always…

10/14/09 by Ankit Patel | lean, lean culture, lean manufacutring, lean transformation, standard work, the lean way consulting |

Most everyone knows about the leaning tower of Pisa but why did it get that way? This is straight from Wikipedia – “The tower began to sink after construction had progressed to the third floor in 1178. This was due to a mere three-meter foundation, set in weak, unstable subsoil,…

10/12/09 by Ankit Patel | lean, lean culture, lean fail, lean manufacutring, lean transformation, the lean way consulting |

Today’s title was the phrase that was told to me when I first started in my lean journey during a transformation process. When going through a lean implementation there are two aspects we look at: 1) Technical and tangible aspectsa. Design elementsb. Schedulingc. Staffingd. And other tools 2) Non-technical and…

10/08/09 by Ankit Patel | company culture, lean, lean culture, lean fail, lean manufacutring, lean transformation, the lean way consulting |

Thank you to www.shmula.com for the photo and an interesting article why lean transformations fail. Thank you also to Henry Ford for the title of today’s blog post. The picture tells a very interesting story. 70% of transformations fail because of ourselves. We are are worst enemies when it comes…