About Michel Baudin

Consultant, trainer, author on Lean Manufacturing

Posts by Michel Baudin:

Aug 14 2013

The Apparent Contradictions of Lean | Lonnie Wilson | IndustryWeek

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Concepts of lean are both counterintuitive and counter-cultural. If you want to be a lean leader, you must go back to the basics and make sure you have a clear understanding of lean. Only then are you able to teach others.”
See on www.industryweek.com

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Aug 14 2013

3 Reasons You Need to Include Employee Engagement in Your Lean Improvement Efforts | Becker’s Hospital Review

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“Done well, the Lean quality improvement philosophy can transform a healthcare organization when it comes to safety, quality, patient satisfaction and overall efficiency. So why aren’t healthcare leaders including employee engagement in the Lean mix? Here are three reasons you should.

1. Employee engagement needs to be on your radar screen daily.
Now more than ever, employee engagement is a game changer in healthcare. Every commitment we’re making to patients, our communities, the board, etc. depends on having engaged employees to deliver the services we are promising; therefore, engagement needs to be a recurring thought — not an afterthought…”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Makes you wonder what kind of “Lean effort” is not based on employee engagement from the start…

See on www.beckershospitalreview.com

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Aug 13 2013

Par Versus Kanban: Managing Variable Usage | Lean Hospital Group

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The great majority of hospitals in the United States manage hospital supplies using what is called the Par Level method. One of the strengths of this method, it is claimed, is that it works well in the face of variable usage.

 

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

If you have always wanted to know how hospitals managed their inventory of medicines, the article will both tell you the traditional method they have been using, and how the Kanban system can outperform it.

See on www.leanhospitalgroup.com

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Aug 13 2013

The Measure of Efficacy of Spend is Value Adding | Bill Waddell | Manufacturing Leadership Center

Lindsay Levkoff Lynn
Lindsay Levkoff Lynn

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“A writer by the name of Lindsay Levkoff Lynn asserts that a charity should not be measured on the basis of the percentage of its money that goes to the cause for which it exists.  “We cannot measure efficacy of spend by looking purely at the ratio of overheads to programme costs,” she says.  I was curious as to how someone could not just be wrong, but absolutely, totally, dead wrong about such a subject …. and then I learned that she is a former Bain consultant with a Harvard MBA and it made more sense.  Fundamental lean principles are simply not part of her intellectual make-up.

In fact, the percentage of their money that goes to creating value for customers is the overarching measure of not just charities, but every organization.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

While I agree with Bill on measuring a charity by the percentage of its money that goes to the cause for which it exists, I don’t follow him in when he chides Levkoff Lynn for saying that P&G is not purely a manufacturing business but also a marketing giant.

While I am not familiar with P&G, I have consulted in the past for a competitor of theirs in detergents and personal products, and was told that, in this business, if you stop promoting a brand, it dies in six months. I don’t know whether this hypothesis has ever been tested, but the managers held it to be self-evident.

Even is you own a well-known brand in a mature market, you must keep advertising it, offering special discounts, and including toys in boxes. It is a massive direct expense, and it affects the manufacturing process, because the promotional materials are actually more difficult to procure and  have longer lead times than the raw materials used to make the product.

See on www.idatix.com

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Aug 10 2013

Guidelines for Fast Lean Transformation | M. Zinser & D. Ryeson | HBR Blog

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One of the most common mistakes that companies make when embarking on a lean program is trying to do too much at once. These “boil-the-ocean” initiatives are long, costly and often end up stalling under the weight of their own…

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Scoop It just brough my attention to this 2 1/2-year old article by BCG consultants Michael Zinser and David Ryeson. Their key point is that a successful Lean implementation must start with a small number of well-chosen, pilot projects, and I agree.

I do, however, part company with them on two other issues. First, they only speak the language of money, relentlessly bringing up costs, savings,  payoffs, metrics and incentives. I understand that this language is familiar and attractive to top management.

The article only cites examples of improvements that have a direct economic impact, but there are many aspects of Lean for which the relationship is indirect. Scoring a goal in tonight’s game has a direct impact on performance; building a championship team doesn’t.

Which brings me to my second disagreement with the authors:  there is no consideration in their article of the need to develop the organization’s technical and managerial skills. They are just assumed to be there.

Lean is about developing a team that is able to compete at the highest level in your industry. If you already have such a team, you are probably not looking to implement Lean. If you don’t have it, you can’t start projects as if you did. Instead, you have to focus on projects that your team can do today and that will start it on its way. The biggest payoff and the practically possible do not always match.

This perspective is missing in their guidelines.

See on blogs.hbr.org

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Aug 9 2013

What Can We Learn from NIST’s Next Generation Manufacturing Studies?

When you hear anyone say “Studies show…”, you want to know who studied what and how, so that you can use what Kaiser Fung calls your number sense to decide what, if anything, can be learned.

Since 2008, “Next Generation Manufacturing Studies” have been conducted in the US by the following:

Results are available on line up to 2011, and the 2013 study is underway. It is intended to evaluate “awareness, best practices, and achievements” in the following six areas:

  1. Customer-focused innnovation.
  2. Engaged people/human-capital acquisition, development, and retention.
  3. Superior process/improvement focus.
  4. Supply-chain management and collaboration.
  5. Sustainability.
  6. Global engagement.

By what methods are these studies conducted? The following is p.27 from the 2011 National Executive Summary:

NGM Methodology

This study is therefore entirely based on questionnaires filled out by a small, self-selected sample of companies rating themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 on issues like “the importance of customer-focused innovation.” It involves no site visit or personal  interviews. The responses were only “cleansed to ensure answers were plausible,” a statement that leaves much to the imagination.

This raises the following questions:

  • What can we learn from such a study?
  • Is this the best we can do with 21st-century data mining technology?

 

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