Comments on: Reflections on Lean 2008

By: Daniel Haughey

Daniel Haughey — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:50:54 +0000

I attended one of the lean 2008 sessions that Rich and Jason did not … Introducing Lean in a Complex Enterprise, John Toussaint (CEO – Thedacare) with David Ben-Tovim (Flinders Medical Centre). Rich was too squeamish to attend.

Some points I took away ….
- ‘defect’ rates in hospitals are very poor in comparison to other industries
- Doctors are trained as individuals, not in standard work, process and continuous improvement
- Their reason for starting the journey was personal frustration, not cost reduction
- Introducing lean has been a long difficult journey (6 years and counting)
- Start with some benchmark (interestingly John chose a local snowblower manufacturer)
- Get a sensei
- You need to visualise the line (before getting to standardised work)
- Relentlessly standardise work (there were some gory examples – of this not happening)

It was great to see such a diverse group on the same journey, and I was surprised how neer the start of that journey most people consider themselves to be.

By: richard durnall

richard durnall — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:54:02 +0000

Thanks Jason.

I remember that story but I hadn’t realised it was Aisin. Interesting, makes more sense now!…

By: Jason Yip

Jason Yip — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:04:57 +0000

It was a great Summit and I’ll definitely attend again next year.

Nice summary. Reminded me of a few things I forgot to mention for my internal summary.

Re: Aisin
I didn’t recognise the name either initially but then I remembered the Aisin fire story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Aisin_fire