I. Briefly describe the answers to the following questions about the readings: a. What simple, inexpensive tool is used by UNC Health Care to communicate to patients? What are the doctors required to do to use this tool? Why did the tool work so well? UNC Health Care initiative included a written care plan and a whiteboard in every room with daily goals to help keep the patient focused on his or her discharge date. So there was a focus on communication with patients.
They had also daily care plan meetings and improved communications based on centralized, accessible data. According to Scholl, creating a fast, easy-to-use plan of care was the essence BCG’s work. Within first 24 hours following admission, the doctor now checks off the care and education a patient will need. With that care plan in place, the care manager and nurse know exactly what to do.
Another part of lean initiative was a top-down review of day-to-day administrative procedures, and identifying common problems, bottlenecks in another areas.No one had to work more hours. UNC Health Care launched a lean pilot program that is increasing efficiency and enabling the hospital to serve more patients. No new hires were needed. UNC health care did more with less! This tool work so well because a hospital with 800 beds that cuts average length by just 10% can free up nearly 80 beds per year, enabling the delivery of more than 4000 additional procedures and boosting operating profit by almost $30 million.
b.What are five ways that businesses in the lean transformation might utilize “excess” people (i. e. those people made available as wasted time/motion is removed from the system) rather than letting them go from the company (1) Reduce overtime (2) Put the extra people on Kaizens (to get future payback) (3) In-source some components rom marginal suppliers (4) Cut the workweek across the board (5) Develop new product lines to grow the business. c.
According to Art Byrne what should be the core of any company’s trategy and why? According to Art Byrne, the core of any company’s strategy is: “To my way of thinking, this is exactly backwards. Introducing lean techniques in every business activity should be the core of any company’s strategy. These provide both the opportunity and the resources to generate and sustain profitable growth. Profitable growth is what the strategic planners of the world are always seeking, but find hard to achieve because their company’s operations can’t deliver on their strategies.
” d.Why are value stream maps and system kaizens critical starting blocks for a lean transformation? The problem with sensei teaching system, once consultants with no direct link to Toyota and many self-taught managers began to practice it, was that there tended to be no big picture waiting to be revealed. Instead of flow kaizen directed at the total flow of value for a product family, there was only process kaizen, and usually lots of process kaizen, focused on isolated individual steps in many value streams.The likely result is “kamikaze kaizen”: lots of commotion, many isolated victories in the great war against muda, wide special initial enthusiasm on the basis of early results, impressive amounts of consciousness raising, and loss of the war when no sustainable benefits reached the customer or the bottom line.
The solution is for firms without access to master sensei to start consciously at the system level for each product family. This means looking at the big picture, including the most important business needs, and determining the overall plan of march before conducting process kaizen on the individual steps.The value-stream map is an invaluable tool to help line managers along the value stream see the whole. The critical error made is failing to connect on one map the flow of information going back from the customer to the producer with the transforming actions on the product, in response to this information, as the good moves toward the customer. Making this connection is the critical leap in being able to see the closed circuit of demand and response that is the essence of value creation, an insight that traditional process maps, showing physical transformation alone, fail to provide. .
Use of standard work in the office includes key points related to what three aspects of task performance? Including what in the standard work will reduce the likelihood that employees will drift away from using the standard work? First element of standard work is the “what”, that is defining the task to be performed. Second, the “how” to perform a step within a process and the “why” – explaining the logic behind the defined tasks. Third element is time and timing. Standard work also includes the expected time to complete a task or group of tasks.Sometimes people drift away from standard work procedures over time. For example, an employee performing a task discovers a change that seems to help himself – a shortcut that enables him to complete his work more quickly.
Will he be likely to play the scenario out and consider whether his change creates an unintended consequence further down the line? What if his change causes quality problems for a downstream process? The bottom line is that well-intentioned employees taking shortcuts can create new problems.
