LEAN Process Improvement: Delivering More with Less

Are your operational processes slow and inefficient? Do customers complain about service delays and costly delivery times? Could inefficiency be costing you business opportunities? LEAN improvement methodologies offer practical, straightforward solutions to transform your thinking, enhance your business systems, and generate rapid, measurable outcomes. LEAN approaches prove particularly valuable for organizations managing operational constraints and aiming to accomplish more with limited capacity.

This course introduces the seven primary sources of operational waste and five primary methodologies to minimize them: 5S, Poka Yoke, Kanban, and Kaizen. You will understand the DMAIC methodology (defining, measuring, analyzing, enhancing, and monitoring), grasp LEAN performance metrics, and understand how LEAN methods connect to Six Sigma approaches. Through this learning, you will create detailed customer value stream maps identifying which activities create value for customers versus those that consume resources without adding value. Subsequently, you will eliminate or substantially reduce non-value-contributing activities.

A dynamic hands-on case study reinforces your learning as you actively work to fix a struggling business process with instructor coaching using LEAN approaches. You will examine, track, and evaluate the problematic procedure, then execute LEAN improvements to observe and verify the enhancement. Furthermore, you will master preserving improvements and creating documentation of your progress. Upon completion, you will take away a LEAN enterprise system readily customizable for your business context. Importantly, when you execute your improvement plan, you will witness rapid advances that enhance operational effectiveness because LEAN transformations consistently produce quicker, more dramatic results.

Who Should Attend:

Senior and middle management leaders responsible for reducing operational spending and increasing organizational profitability within their departments or divisions.

How You Will Benefit:

• Center your efforts on meeting customer needs and expectations
• Distinguish activities that produce customer value from those that do not
• Evaluate and benchmark current operational performance
• Redesign ineffective and cumbersome procedures for enhanced performance
• Remeasure improved procedure performance to confirm gains
• Adapt a LEAN technique you can put into practice immediately
• Accomplish superior results more quickly with constrained resources

What You Will Cover:

• Exploring core LEAN concepts and fundamental principles
• Locating and diagnosing operational bottlenecks that create expense and complexity
• Building maps showing the customer value chain
• Establishing LEAN performance measurements
• Connecting LEAN methodologies to Six Sigma improvements
• Recognizing the seven categories of process waste
• Mastering the five primary LEAN transformation methods: 5S, Poka Yoke, Kanban, and Kaizen
• Deploying LEAN solutions to reduce operational waste and expense
• Understanding ongoing refinement and incremental progress concepts