A Lean Action Workbook from the Lean Enterprise Academy, a affiliate of the Lean Global Network and the Lean Enterprise Institute For the first time, Making Hospitals Work provides a practical road map for healthcare leaders seeking to create truly lean hospitals. It outlines a clear framework for focusing improvement activities on the most important challenges facing each hospital. It uses the same evidence-based, scientific method as clinicians use to diagnose and treat medical problems to analyze and redesign the core emergency and elective patient journeys from arrival to discharge. It opens everyone's eyes to the big win-win-win opportunities to eliminate unnecessary waiting time for patients, to synchronize activities so clinical staff can spend more time caring for patients, and to free up capacity by reducing length of stay and cut the overtime and agency budget. It also introduces the key new role of the value-stream manager in gaining agreement on what needs to be done by whom in every department across the hospital. Every step described in Making Hospitals Work has been tried and tested in the three years' action research that led to this workbook. It is the critical breakthrough to take the next steps on the lean healthcare journey.

Making Hospitals Work: How to Improve Patient Care While Saving Everyone's Time and Hospitals' Resources

Medical Books

Baker, Marc

Administration & Medicine Economics

Lean Enterprise Institute

Much more important, these simple maps - often drawn on scrap paper - showed where steps could be eliminated, flows smoothed, and pull systems introduced in order to create a truly lean value stream for each product family.
In 1998 John teamed with Mike Rother of the University of Michigan to write down Toyota's mapping methodology for the first time in Learning to See. This simple tool makes it possible for you to see through the clutter of a complex plant. You'll soon be able to identify all of the processing steps along the path from raw materials to finished goods for each product and all of the information flows going back from the customer through the plant and upstream to suppliers. With this knowledge in hand it is much easier to envision a "future state" for each product family in which wasteful actions are eliminated and production can be pulled smoothly ahead by the customer.
In plain language and with detailed drawings, this workbook explains everything you will need to know to create accurate current-state and future- state maps for each of your product families and then to turn the current state into the future state rapidly and sustainably.
In Learning to See you will find:
<ul>
<li>A foreword by Jim Womack and Dan Jones explaining the need for this tool.</li>
<li>An introduction by Mike Rother and John Shook describing how they discovered the mapping tool in their study of Toyota.</li>
<li>Guidance on identifying your product families.</li>
<li>A detailed explanation of how to draw a current-state map.</li>
<li>A practice case permitting you to draw a current-state map on your own, with feedback from Mike and John in the appendix on how you did.</li>
<li>A detailed explanation of how to draw a future-state map.</li>
<li>A second practice case permitting you to draw a future-state map, with "the answer" provided in the appendix.</li>
<li>Guidance on how to designate a manager for each value stream.</li>
<li>Advice on breaking implementation into easy steps.</li>
<li>An explanation of how to use the yearly value stream plan to guide each product family through successive future states.</li>
</ul>
More than 50,000 copies of Learning to See have been sold in the past two years. Readers from across the world report that value stream mapping has been an invaluable tool to start their lean transformation and to make the best use of kaizen events.

Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping to Add Value and Eliminate MUDA

Business & Money

Mike Rother

John Shook

Management & Leadership

Winner of the 2003 Shingo Prize!
Creating Continuous Flow narrows the focus of Learning to See from the door-to-door value stream perspective to achieving true continuous flow at your critical pacemaker processes.
This new workbook explains in simple, step-by-step terms how to introduce and sustain lean flows of material and information in pacemaker cells and lines, a prerequisite for achieving a lean value stream. Creating Continuous Flow takes you to the next level in cellularization where you'll achieve even greater cost and lead time savings.
You'll Learn:
<ul>
<li>Where to focus your continuous flow efforts</li>
<li>How to create much more efficient cells and lines</li>
<li>How to operate a pacemaker process so that a lean value stream is possible</li>
<li>How to sustain the gains and keep improving</li>
</ul>

Creating Continuous Flow: An Action Guide for Managers, Engineers & Production Associates

Rick Harris

ROTHER,MIKE

Winner of the 2003 Shingo Prize!
By identifying all the steps and time required to move a typical product from raw materials to finished goods, the authors show that nearly 90 percent of the actions and 99.99 percent of the time required for the value chain's Current State create no value. In addition, the mapping method clearly shows demand amplification of orders as they travel up the value stream, steadily growing quality problems, and steadily deteriorating shipping performance at every point up stream from the customer.
The mapping methodology takes managers step-by-step through an improvement process that converts the traditional value stream of isolated operations into an ideal future-state value stream in which value flows from raw materials to customer in just 6 percent of the time previously needed. The dramatically improved value stream also eliminates unnecessary transport links, inventories, and handoffs, the key drivers of hidden connectivity costs.
Applying the method to a realistic example, the authors show how four firms sharing a value stream can create a win-win-win-win-win future in which everyone, including the end consumer, can be better off.

Seeing the Whole: Mapping the Extended Value Stream

Jones, Daniel T.

Womack, James P.

With help from the Lean Community, we made the new Third Edition of the Lean Lexicon even more valuable and useful. Starting with improvement ideas from Community members like you, we researched and added 21 definitions to the latest edition of this popular and indispensable reference book.
 The expanded Third Edition, featuring 58 illustrations, defines 187 key lean terms from A3 Report to Yokoten. The new definitions include Lean Consumption and Lean Provision, the groundbreaking ideas on using lean principles to build a new producer-consumer model described in Lean Solutions by James Womack and Daniel Jones. True to the Lexicon's description as a "graphical glossary," we included consumption and provision maps. Here's the complete list of new terms:
 * Genchi Genbutsu * Hansei * Jishuken * Lean Consumption Maps * Lean Provision * Quality Function Deployment * Shojinka * Six Sigma * Theory of Constraints * Total Quality Management * Yokoten * Group Leaders * Isolated Islands * Lean Consumption * Lean Provision Maps * Preventive Maintenance * Resident Engineer * Quality Control Circle * Team Leader * Total Quality Control * Work Element
 The new edition retains past improvement ideas from readers, such as the simple, one-page guide to pronouncing Japanese terms.
 Unlike most other business glossaries in print or online, the Lexicon is focused exclusively on lean thinking. It also makes abundant use of illustrations and examples, and was compiled with input from managers and engineers who are implementing lean.

Lean Lexicon: A Graphical Glossary for Lean Thinkers

For companies to be competitive, leaders must engage people at all levels in order to focus their energy and enable them to apply lean principles to everything they do. Strategy deployment, called hoshin kanri by Toyota, has proven to be the most effective process for meeting this ongoing challenge. In his new book Getting the Right Things Done, author and LEI faculty member Pascal Dennis outlines the nuts and bolts of strategy deployment, answering two tough questions that ultimately can make or break a company's lean transformation: * What kind of planning system is required to inspire meaningful company-wide continuous improvement? * How might we change existing mental models that do not support a culture of continuous improvement? Getting the Right Things Done demonstrates how strategy deployment can help leaders harness the full power of Lean. Organization leaders at all levels and the management teams who are responsible for strategy deployment will find this book especially insightful. It tells the story of a fictional (yet very real) midsized company, Atlas Industries that needs to dramatically improve to compete with emerging rivals and meet new customer demands. Getting the Right Things Done chronicles the journey of the company and its President/COO, an experienced lean leader who was hired five years ago to steer Atlas in the right direction. While Atlas had already applied some basic lean principles, it had not really connected the people and business processes so that the company could dramatically improve. Atlas' challenge: "Something was missing: a way of focusing and aligning the efforts of good people, and a delivery system, something that would direct the tools to the right places." Enter strategy deployment. The book is designed to provide readers with a framework for understanding the key components of strategy deployment: agreeing on the company's "True North," working within the PDCA cycle, getting conse

Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader's Guide to Planning and Execution

Dennis, Pascal

CREANDO FLUJO CONTINUO

Unknown, Author

When faced with problems many business leaders and teams reach for familiar and standard problem-solving methods, often creating unnecessary struggle, frustration, delay, and ineffectiveness in solving the problem -- if it is ever solved at all! In other words, they keep reaching for the same old hammer as if every business problem were a nail. In Four Types of Problems, continuous improvement expert and author Art Smalley shows you how to break the "hammer-and-nail" trap. He demonstrates that most business problems fall into four main categories: 1.Troubleshooting 2. Gap-from-standard3. Target-state 4. Open-ended and Innovation "Organizations and individuals at all levels fall into the trap of having one primary or standard way of solving every problem," writes Smalley, who learned problem solving from Tomoo Harada at Toyota's historic Kamigo engine plant. Harada led the maintenance activities that created the stability needed for Taiichi Ohno's innovations in the Toyota Production System. Each type of problem category requires different thought processes, improvement methods, and management cadences. Each type has its own sub-system and surfacing mechanism, management cadence, timing, and difficulty level, he explained. One size does not fit all situations and just training people in tools or techniques only scratches the surface of problem solving.

Four Types of Problems

Art Smalley

When the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina receded around New Orleans, they revealed unimaginable destruction and a traditional disaster recovery process that was Byzantine, costly, and far too slow for the victims who just wanted to get home. Getting Home is the inspiring story of a defense lawyer and a school teacher who left their careers to rebuild homes for desperate survivors but wound up reconstructing the entire process for rebuilding after disasters. Authors Liz McCartney and Zack Rosenburg describe how SBP, the disaster relief nonprofit they founded, partnered with Toyota to apply the lean principles of the Toyota Production System to rebuild homes and lives following hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods throughout the U.S. and its territories. For lean thinkers, this story offers a fresh look at lean tools being used in non-traditional settings. With a short-term volunteer workforce, a layer of middle management that turns over every 10 months, and constantly shifting sources of income, SBP seemed like it could never escape a constant cycle of emergencies and triumphs. Using lean tools, however, Liz and Zack got their work processes under control and found the time to think deeply about the nature of disasters and rebuilding and found themselves with a clearer mission. The book also details an innovative, 9-step blueprint for how private industry, relief agencies, volunteers, and all levels of government can work together to dramatically shrink the time between when disasters hit and victims get home in a prompt, efficient, and predictable way.

Getting Home

Liz McCartney and Zack Rosenburg

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Lean Enterprise Institute publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lean Enterprise Institute