Tag: lean business processes

image of person thinking

Develop a “Why?” Mindset

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Lean, at its heart, is about finding the root causes of problems that prevent you from achieving your goals. Often, what stands in the way...
Motion blur photograph of chef stirring pasta sauce on stove.

The Recipe for My Secret Sauce

  No, this isn’t a special holiday cooking edition of the LeanBP Blog! To celebrate the season, I thought I’d share with you the formula...
image of a comet labeled with the five disciplines of speed

Go Faster, Produce More—but with Integrity

If you’ve been following my blog regularly, you know that my Lean Applied to Business Processes course is actually the product of what I’ve...
illustration of sound frequency

Cut the Noise and Tame the Common Cause (Part Two of Two)

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In my last post, I laid out the difference between special cause and common cause variation. Why is it important to know the difference? Because...
image of small stones balanced on a larger stone

Optimizing Without Balance—A Vicious Cycle

It’s counterintuitive to think that maximizing your job or your department’s throughput can have a detrimental effect on your company. But that’s exactly the...
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LABP’s Biggest Gift Is Time

How are you coming along with your end-of-year initiatives? Are you realizing noticeable gains, or are you getting bogged down with too much work...

When Finger-Pointing Is a Good Thing

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This month’s blog post will be short and sweet. Why? My WIP is at max! (If this concept is new to you, revisit my...
This photo of a garden hose with kinks illustrates the bottlenecks that impede workflow in the business office.

Three Warning Signs Your Process Improvement Effort Will Fail

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"Constraint: anything that limits a system from achieving higher performance versus its goal." —Eli Goldratt, What Is This Thing Called Theory of Constraints and How...
illustration of cause-and-effect diagram

A Better Way to Brainstorm Root Causes

Determining root causes seems to be a lost art. It’s a discipline, and if we aren’t willing to apply disciplined thinking when diagnosing a...
sipoc table diagram

SIPOC with a Twist (Think Policies, not Processes)

In order to do your job, you need to see your job. As some of you already know, SIPOC is a process improvement tool that...