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On My Mind:Hello and welcome to Spotlight on CI, a newsletter from CI Consulting Services (CICS), which offers you practical continuous improvement solutions for the real world. It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of day-to-day activities. This newsletter is a reminder to spend some time focusing on getting better and achieving process excellence. It’s meant to help YOU stick with the journey of continuous improvement. Here you’ll find tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way to help make improvements that last. Sharing these experiences with you is our opportunity to give something back to tomorrow’s change agents today, with an emphasis on process improvement in your world. While performing your daily job, how often have you thought “There has to be a better way!” without being quite sure how to achieve it? CI is very much rooted in common sense. However, there are principles and tools available to achieve better results that will last. Topics include practical applications of Lean and Six Sigma tools and principles, ‘soft skills’ like effective communication, teaming, leadership and organizational development. These are the tools that will enable you to build a robust and lasting CI culture. The newsletter will be issued on a regular basis and the recipients are all people I have had contact with in the past – no mailing lists were used in distributing the newsletter. If you do not wish to receive any more issues, feel free to use the unsubscribe link below. If you know people who may want to subscribe, forward it; they can click HERE or contact us at Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions, comments or questions about topics of interest to you, or just want to say ‘hello’ and catch up, please drop me a line. Many people receiving this newsletter are already sold on the need to improve processes and outcomes every day. However, you may have colleagues who aren’t convinced that Lean is what the business needs. The article below, "How to Know if Lean Can Work for You", was inspired by a frequent occurrence during Lean classes. Often, a participant would come up to me after class and say, “Manny, what you said made perfect sense – but, I don’t see how to apply it to what I/we do on a daily basis.” Read on and learn how….
How to Know if Lean Can Work for YouLean is mostly a common-sense methodology that requires identifying waste in your processes and then applying tools to reduce or eliminate waste. Often people new to Lean don’t understand some of the basic linkages between aspects of Lean as discussed in this article. Lean is defined as “eliminating waste” in processes. Much of this is common sense, although some tools, or ‘countermeasures,’ in Lean can be counterintuitive. The 8 Wastes as recognized in Lean can be remembered using the acronym DOWNTIME although I prefer TIMPWOOD.
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