There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

~ Colin Powell

Learning is all about acquiring new knowledge or reinforcing existing knowledge. Behavior, skills, values, or preferences lead to a change in processing information, depth of the knowledge, attitude or behavior relative to the type and range of experience. Learning does not happen all at once, but it builds upon and is shaped by previous knowledge. To that end, learning may be viewed as a process, rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge. Learning produces change and the change produced is relatively permanent. Highly successful business professionals understand that learning never stops. It is an ongoing, necessary process which creates innovation and success. When you stop learning, your forward progress slowly grinds to a halt. You will find yourself left behind in a profession that you no longer understand.

One of the most effective modes of learning is reading. Most successful professional devour books. Their minds crave new thoughts and provocative ideas that are presented in books. They push away the temptation of media that doesn’t make them smarter, richer or more successful in their profession. You should set aside at least two hours every day to read and learn. We have identified five books that you should add to your bookshelf of professional development in Six Sigma.

The Toyota Way – The 14 key principles that define the Toyota style of management.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement – Learn how bottlenecks in the manufacturing process hinder the company from meeting its goals.

This is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox – The book has brought greater clarification to the essence of lean and revolutionized top executives and employees understanding of what lean actually is.

Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process – This Lean management book provides an introduction to the A3 process as well as methodologies to discover the root cause of a problem.

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development – By focusing on eight major areas that help product organizations achieve flow, the author uses data and practical methods to guide product organizations to this new approach to delivery processes.

**Note** This list is not an endorsement of the author or is it a ranking of importance or relevance.

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Mark Graban is an internationally recognized leader in Lean healthcare and continuous improvement. His motivation is to apply Lean and Toyota Production System principles to improve quality of care and patient safety, to improve the customer-patient experience, to help the development of medical professionals and employees, and to help build strong organizations for the long term.

Lean management principles have been used effectively in manufacturing companies for decades. Those same principles can also be successfully applied to the delivery of healthcare. Lean  healthcare begins with driving out waste so that all work adds value and serves the customer-patient needs. Identifying value added and non-value added steps in every process is the beginning of the journey toward success.

Although Lean healthcare differs in many ways from manufacturing, there are also surprising similarities. Whether building a car or providing healthcare for a customer-patient, workers must rely on multiple, complex processes to accomplish their tasks and provide value to the customer or patient. Waste of money, time, supplies, or good will always decreases value.

Check out this educational video from Mark Graban.

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Implementing Lean Management

In 2012, Michael Grogan introduced the principles of Lean Management to CCBRT. In this interview Suzan Boon, Deputy CEO of CCBRT, discusses the opportunities and challenges of implementing Lean Management within their healthcare facility.

Suzan was very energized with the implementation of the practice. She was encouraged to see results happening in just a few short weeks. Her impressions were that issues that were embedded in the organization were quickly coming to light, and the communication flow between the top and bottom of the organization was significantly increased. Susan felt strongly that Lean Management is allowing CCBRT to get more structure within the organization and quickly increase efficiencies.

Take a few minutes and view this video on CCBRT.

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Lean management principles have been used effectively in manufacturing companies for decades, particularly in Japan. Lean thinking begins with driving out waste so that all work adds value and serves the customer’s needs. Identifying value added and non-value added steps in every process is the beginning of the journey toward lean operations. In order for lean principles to take root, leaders must first work to create an organizational culture that is receptive to lean thinking. The commitment to lean must start at the very top of the organization, and all staff should be involved in helping to redesign processes to improve flow and reduce waste.

Adapting Lean Healthcare

Lean healthcare differs in many ways from manufacturing, but there are also surprising similarities: Whether building a car or providing healthcare for a patient, organizations must rely on multiple, complex processes to accomplish their tasks and focus on the value to the patient.

Introducing lean healthcare in an organization is a major challenge. It cannot be done piecemeal, but must be a whole-system strategy. There is no single silver bullet solution that will achieve the same results. And it cannot be done only by middle managers or frontline workers. Those at the very top of the organization, in the C-suite, must lead! Implementing lean healthcare requires major change management throughout an entire organization. A strong commitment from the C-suite is essential to the success of an effort this challenging. The CEO must be a vocal, visible champion of lean healthcare!

Innovation and visionary healthcare organizations are leading the way by demonstrating that lean healthcare can reduce waste with results comparable to other industries. Leaders in healthcare organizations must emphasize the importance of creating an organizational culture that is ready and willing to accept lean thinking.

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In today’s challenging healthcare environment, improving quality and efficiency, while controlling costs are more important than ever to the success of the industry. Government regulations associated with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and rising costs of services are significantly stretching healthcare organizations. With the increasing administrative burdens, healthcare organizations look immediately to cutting costs across the board. Staffing is a major expense and typically is the first focus for change.

Lean Healthcare Drives Efficiencies

Over the past ten years, healthcare cases reveal that Lean Healthcare practices are as applicable in complex healthcare environments as Lean practices are in assembly-line manufacturing. When well executed, Lean Healthcare practices transforms how an organization thinks and works, creating an insatiable quest for improvement.

Lean Healthcare practices are a cultural shift that changes how a healthcare organization thinks and works; no one stays on the sidelines in the quest to discover how to improve the daily work. It demands new habits, new skills and often a new attitude throughout the organization from senior management to frontline service providers. Creating a culture of Lean in healthcare is to create an insatiable appetite for improvement.

To maximize value and eliminate waste, healthcare organizations, as in other organizations, must evaluate processes by accurately specifying the value desired by the user; identifying every step in the process and eliminating non-value added steps and making value flow from beginning to end based on the expressed needs of the patient.

A major principle in the application of Lean Healthcare practices is to eliminate the amount of time currently spent on non-value added activities in the delivery of the highest quality of patient care. In other words, by identifying the essential elements of healthcare and eliminating the wasteful activities, you will increase the productivity of your workforce and reduce costs.

A Study of Lean Healthcare Effectiveness

Follow this link for a study titled Lean Thinking In Healthcare: Review of Implementation Results.

If you’d like to read more, check out these Lean and Healthcare posts >>>

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Healthcare is a field that can always benefit from more optimizations and improvements, and long wait times are probably the most common complaint among facilities across the whole world. It makes sense too, as in many cases a patient’s need for attention will be urgent at least from their perspective while on the other hand, the facility may be overloaded, with physicians working around the clock to be able to treat everyone.

Ensuring that you’re running an efficient facility is often a matter of applying the right lean tools to the situation, and there are many things you can do to make things run more smoothly and ensure that patients don’t have to wait as long.

1. Triaging

Correctly identifying cases that need more attention is often the biggest issue to address in a typical healthcare facility, and this is where the biggest wastes of time tend to occur. It’s important to ensure that you have a solid triage process in place that can direct patients to the appropriate part of the facility as quickly as possible.

This may not look like a traditional lean tool, but it actually has some close ties to the way the overall methodology works, and it’s important to pay a lot of attention to your triaging practices if you want to see an effective reduction in wait times.

2. Process Capability Analysis

Identifying the limits of each of your processes is also important, but it may not be very straightforward when you have multiple different processes to deal with, especially ones governed by different physicians. Process capability analysis is something every lean leader should already be familiar with, and it’s a common part of optimizing many types of processes. Applying it to healthcare is not that difficult either, and doesn’t usually require a significant change in your approach.

3. Identifying Bottlenecks

Figuring out where exactly bottlenecks occur is not always easy, especially in a busy hospital with a frantic working pace, but a careful study of the way resources and people flow through different processes can have a huge impact on your overall performance. There are different ways to study this part of your facility, and once you’ve identified a method that works well in your case, you’ll probably be surprised at how many bottlenecks will start popping up on your radar.

Of course it’s not necessary to deal with all of them immediately it can actually be counterproductive to do so but addressing the major ones can often change things for the better by a large degree.

4. Reducing Waste

Waste is a huge negative word in the world of lean and Six Sigma, and learning to identify and remove it from your operations is going to become one of your main tasks as a lean leader. A healthcare facility often has a lot of waste in its regular work, and sometimes the situation can be so bad that you may actually be running at less than 50% resource utilization without even realizing it. Figuring out where the biggest points of waste are and addressing them swiftly will allow your employees to treat patients with a better efficiency.

5. Reorganizing Physical Space

Last but not least, you should think about a reorganization of the physical layout of your facility if it’s been awhile since this had been done. A major point of lean and Six Sigma is the way physical layouts shape the overall flow of resources in an organization, and while it can sometimes be difficult to move things around in a hospital, it’s worth a try if the situation allows for it.

Just make sure that this doesn’t come at a cost to the productivity of your physicians, as inconveniencing them for too long is obviously going to cause much bigger issues with the facility than long wait times. Giving everyone a fair warning in advance, and ensuring that there are processes in place to minimize the impact to your employees, is going to go a long way in reducing the negative impact on the facility as a whole. And in the end, you may find some surprising benefits from this reorganization, including increased patient satisfaction!

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While Six Sigma originated in manufacturing, it’s common knowledge nowadays that it’s being applied in many more fields. There are even some surprising implementations of lean methodologies around us, and one doesn’t have to look too far to find some amazing examples of the possibilities that this type of thinking creates.

If you’re wondering whether Six Sigma would be suitable for your own company’s needs, the more likely answer is yes,” no matter what type of business you’re in. As long as you can break down your work in some systematic manner to its basic components, you can apply analytical thinking to improve that work and get the most out of every second spent making your product. But if you’re still not convinced, let’s take a look at some of the more interesting examples of how Six Sigma is transforming the world around us right now.

Streamlining Public Transportation

Transportation of any kind is deeply reliant on strict logistics, and a well-developed organization has multiple backups for situations of failure, which are not uncommon when dealing with a service like this. Public transportation in particular is a very difficult area, especially in some parts of the world where its progress is hindered by issues with the local infrastructure.

A recently published study by Ãœmit Kuvvetli and Ali Riza Firuzan takes a deeper look into the opportunities presented by implementing Six Sigma in public transportation, and their findings support the theory that this is an area which can benefit particularly well from a proper application of lean practices.

Some of their findings might seem obvious to even an inexperienced observer, but others were more interesting such as the idea that specialized bus drivers are necessary to handle specific routes that present unique challenges. Appropriate selection of bus types is another point that was investigated in more detail.

Building Better Employee Relations with Lean HR Departments

HR workers are traditionally seen under a suspicious light by employees, and there is typically a pretty big barrier that has to be overcome before an HR department becomes truly effective in a company’s work. There has been some analysis over this situation lately, particularly focused on lean methodologies, and the findings should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Six Sigma. HR departments can benefit a lot from applying concepts like continuous improvement and streamlining their work.

This is something more companies should look into, as it can have a profound impact on employee morale and other aspects that companies tend to struggle with on a regular basis.

Keeping the Population Healthy with Lean Healthcare

Healthcare is another field that is struggling in many parts of the world, even in more developed areas. There are some long-running problems in the way this is handled in many places, and we’ve seen some successful examples of applying lean methodologies to improve those situations.

In some more rural parts of Kansas, the structure of healthcare is a huge issue, one that local hospitals have been able to resolve with the assistance of Six Sigma Black Belt specialists. Various findings were made while analyzing the processes in the hospital, and the evaluation ended up with a significant reduction in the hospital’s expenses.

Some of the areas where spending was reduced came as a bit of a surprise. For example, the hospital was struggling with hiring and retaining candidates, but at the same time, the consultants recommended cutting down on the recruiting budget significantly. The final result was an improvement in the hospital’s financial flow, allowing them to focus better on providing an adequate working environment for the specialists they were able to draw in.

At the same time, more changes were implemented that made the hospital a more attractive working place for people with the right skills. These changes might have seemed counterproductive to someone without intricate lean experience and knowledge of how processes work, but this should serve as a bright example of why it’s so important to gain a deep understanding of this field.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples, but the internet is full of case studies showing that lean is working very well in many parts of the world, and in areas that are not traditionally associated with continuous improvement and systematic analysis. We are sure that the situation is only going to keep improving in this regard in the future, as many people are currently discovering the huge benefits of lean methodologies, and creatively applying them to new areas.

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