Continuous Improvement Blog

People often find themselves getting caught up in a pile of tasks they need to complete. These tasks exist in their personal lives, work projects, or school assignments. When people get wrapped up in the amount of tasks they are faced with, they tend to not know where to begin. They become uncertain on how to organize and prioritize these tasks. This can lead to missing events or deadlines and feeling very overwhelmed. However, lean tools can be the perfect fix to this overwhelming feeling; one in particular is the Personal Kanban.

A Personal Kanban is a tool used to help visualize, prioritize, and complete tasks. It also aids in managing work by volume and highest value so an individual can see what order tasks should be completed in. This lean tool also works with the individual to help them be successful because it’s directly tailored to the needs of that person. Some main benefits of using this tool are it organizes allotted time, provides a foundation for improvement efforts in work flow, and supports communication and coordination with a supervisor.  There are many different ways to set up a Personal Kanban. This and the fact that it can be used anywhere and it tracks items that are of personal value to the individual. These are what make it personal.

Around the Office of Continuous Improvement many Personal Kanbans can be seen, since all of the employees here use them. They all include tasks and projects we need to complete around the office and when we need to complete them; however, no two look exactly alike. Some of us choose to use an online format, while others go with a simple white board and sticky notes, and others have detailed layouts, but in every case these Kanbans help us all organize our tasks in a way that will help us complete them efficiently and effectively. Also our Personal Kanbans are constantly changing because we are continually trying to figure out the best layout and platform that works for us as individuals. One way to measure how well a Personal Kanban set-up fits you, is to examine if you are actually using it. Because after all, if you’re not using the tool, obviously something is not working right.  If you’re feeling overwhelmed by tasks, expectations, and commitments use the examples below to form your own Personal Kanban and get those tasks organized!

Welcome Rick Berkey: Faculty Fellow in the Office of Continuous Improvement

This year, Rick Berkey joins us on a special assignment through Michigan Tech’s Faculty Fellows Program. In this role, Rick will be focusing his efforts on broadening and strengthening continuous improvement in the academic units.

Good morning everyone! I’ve been fortunate to get to know many of you across campus in my role as Professor of Practice and Director of the Enterprise Program in the Pavlis Honors College. Some of you also know me through my involvement as a Lean Implementation Leader, where I have facilitated several Kaizen events going back to 2010 when Michigan Tech began investing in a more formal Lean and Continuous Improvement (CI) initiative. I have been at Michigan Tech since 2006, when I transitioned to academia following a successful industry career that spanned 12 years, three companies, and numerous roles in engineering, product development, program management, operations, quality, and continuous improvement.

Five years into my career, I was selected to participate in Honeywell’s Six Sigma Black Belt program, an intense 160-hour training program involving the use of CI methods and tools to improve business performance and success. My certification project was the development and launch of a new product line (still in production today – the FRAM Xtended Guard oil filter). Looking back, my Black Belt experience was career and life-changing for me — the tools and methods “clicked” and just made good sense, and more importantly the corporate culture embraced continuous improvement as a key enabler for achieving its strategic goals and objectives. This experience opened up many doors for me professionally, and in fact my corporate Six Sigma training and Green Belt mentoring activities played a large role in my decision to pursue a career in higher education. Like many of my peers, I find great reward and satisfaction in my interactions with Michigan Tech students — whether it be in my two Six Sigma courses, helping to ignite that same “spark” I felt in my early career; in my advising role to the Supermileage Systems Enterprise; or in the periodic interactions I have with the hundreds of students enrolled in our signature Enterprise Program. Our students are our future, and from what I can see it’s look pretty bright!

This year, I “raised my hand” to get more involved in Michigan Tech’s continuous improvement efforts through a part-time faculty fellow appointment. One of the goals I have is to lead by example to show how it can be applied more strategically and successfully in our core academic value streams: teaching, research, and service. Admittedly the language of continuous improvement can be confusing, the tools can be misapplied, and skeptics can and do question its relevance to their work. However, I think CI is quite simple and it really boils down to some key elements that should resonate with employees in any organization:

1. Continuous improvement is a culture…it’s a mindset that strives for perfection and recognizes that you’re never fully there. It rewards calculated risks and embraces change.
2. Quality starts and ends with the customer…it’s about knowing your customers, and striving to deliver the quality and value they (and their customers) expect from your products, processes, and/or services. After all, there is always competition and choice in the marketplace.
3. Customer value is created through processes or value streams…these can be transactional/service as well as manufacturing/product-oriented. Organizations define the processes they use to create and deliver value, meaning they also have the ability to change these processes in order to improve performance.
4. Waste is anything that doesn’t directly create value for the customer…most processes have significant amounts of waste, and learning to identify and minimize waste in its many forms is a core strategy of a successful CI program.
5. Continuous improvement is really about building and freeing organizational capacity, not cutting costs and people. Capacity gives organizations agility and options, whether it be investing in new growth, reallocating existing resources to higher value activities, and/or sustaining competitiveness during downturns and market contractions.
6. Respect for people is the foundation of any successful CI initiative…fundamentally this means empowering employees, harnessing their knowledge, actively involving them in improvements, and avoiding blame (focus on the process, not the person). It also means developing empathy for your customers and their experiences with your products, processes, and services. Finally, it’s also about celebrating the successes achieved together through continuous improvement.

I have experienced first-hand how continuous improvement can fuel the growth and success of an organization, enabling it to not only adapt, evolve, and stay relevant, but also to lead in dynamic market conditions. This is what motivates me to take on my faculty fellows assignment this year. The timing couldn’t be better — as we embark on the University’s Tech Forward initiative, I firmly believe our continuous improvement culture and tool-set can and will help us achieve the goals we’ve outlined for our institution’s future. Fortunately we have a good start already, and I’m excited to play a more active role and look forward to working with more of my colleagues. I will be reaching out to many of you soon as I begin working on the initial opportunities we’ve identified. Likewise, I welcome your input and thoughts on areas where you see CI being used to improve the success of our great University.  –Rick

Joining our PIC team this year is our newest addition Sophie Pawloski. Sophie is a third year, Mechanical engineering student here at Tech. She is very excited to learn more about the lean culture and implement lean into her own life while helping promote it around campus. Now Sophie will tell you a little bit about herself!

Hello!

My name is Sophie Pawloski. I was born and raised in a small town in downstate Michigan called Durand. This is my third year here at Tech working towards my Mechanical Engineering degree and it been some of the best years to date! You can probably find me at most Tech sporting events cheering them on with the dance team. In my free-time I also enjoy snowboarding, hiking, and just exploring the Keweenaw.

I was introduced to lean the summer after my freshman year at my first internship working at Magna. They were very involved in lean manufacturing and focused heavily on it at their facility. During my few months there I was able to participate in Kaizens, 5S during change over, and implement many lean ideas, which they called lean thinkers, into the assembly processes there. After this I was able to see the impact lean had on not only the company as a whole, but individual workers as well. In lean everyone’s opinion is valued which can really boost the morale of a company! After this experience lean had me hooked.

Since I’ve started the training process in the Office of Continuous Improvement I’ve learned so many new lean tool that I’m beginning to implement into my everyday life, like how I organize my planner or putting up a whiteboard in my room. I’m so excited to continue this journey and see not only how lean affects Michigan Tech but also how I can implement it into my own life!

Thank you!

If you listen to the news, you aren’t going to hear much on car crashes unless there has been a very bad one, or it is just a slow news day and they have nothing else to report. Plane crashes will be on the news whether it was a relatively minor incident, or a major one. This shows the two ways we can view a defect or a problem, either as a car crash, an inevitable incident that is bound to happen, or as a plane crash, a zero tolerance policy.

I recently watched a video that showed how these two different lines of thinking can have an enormous impact on someone’s life. This video was called “Do No Harm” by VOX on YouTube, and it outlines how treating an infection as a “car crash” or a “plane crash” can determine the life and death of patients in hospitals. During the video, an interview is conducted with the mother of a little girl named Nora, who had been born with an underdeveloped lung. Because of this defect, Nora had to have what is called a central line implant: a tube that is inserted into a vein that leads directly to the heart and is used for the speedy delivery of medicine and easy blood draws. An infection of this line can be very serious and extremely life-threatening.  Nora had four of these infections.  Because of these infections, she passed away just before her fourth birthday. Nora’s mother wrote a letter to the hospital where she was treated, outlining what she had seen and offered feedback. The hospital responded with a letter that stated “… We understand and recognize your feelings regarding Nora’s care and we apologize that you were dissatisfied with your experience…” This hospital treated central line infections like car crashes, an unavoidable risk, instead of something that could be prevented.

The second hospital shown in the video had a team of nurses who experienced many central line infections a few years back, and they decided to do something about it. They asked themselves if having zero infections was even possible, but one of the RNs at the hospital leading the project stated “You cannot accept good enough, you have to eliminate those [infections]…” The team used two books to aid them in their mission:  “The Toyota Way” by Jeffery Liker and “Toyota Kata” by Mike Rother. With them, the hospital was able to adopt some aspects of Lean and Continuous Improvement, and together, the nurses developed practices that minimize the chance of exposure to something that can infect the central line. The team implemented a zero tolerance policy towards central line infections and this hospital went seven years without a single infection.

The video ends with the team going to talk to an expert on central lines and how to prevent infections in them. The expert stated that their first step in preventing infections was treating every infection as a defect, finding the root cause of the problem, and finding a way to prevent it from happening again.

Treating problems in this way is Lean Thinking, and this is a real-life example that shows the way we approach problems can have a real impact on the outcomes. Before, manufacturing had been the go-to example for implementing Lean, but this video is an amazing example of how Lean and Continuous Improvement can be implemented in all kinds of areas, and what the results can look like when it is.

Welcome Mitchell Carpenter

A newcomer to our team of PICs is Mitchell Carpenter. He is from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is currently a Second year Materials Science and Engineering major here at Michigan Tech. He is returning after having finished his training at the end of last semester, but has already started to integrate parts of Lean culture into his everyday life.

Mitchell will now tell us a bit about himself!

Hello everyone, I’m Mitchell and I am from Ada, Michigan, which is just East of Grand Rapids. I went to Forest Hills Central High school and graduated there with the class of 2017. I have been in contact with the Continuous improvement team here at Michigan Tech since the summer of 2017  when I met them at a Lean conference in Traverse City. I was there with the director of Continuous Improvement at a company I had an internship with called Nucraft Furniture. This is where I was first introduced to the concept of Lean and Continuous Improvement.

The philosophy behind Lean and Continuous Improvement has fascinated me ever since I was introduced to it. The fact that there was actually a name for a culture around striving to make things more efficient blew my mind since I have enjoyed problem solving and efficiency since childhood.

I am excited to be a part of the PIC team here at Michigan Tech. I was a part of this office for about three weeks before the end of last year and I can already tell that I am going to like it here. I am thankful for this opportunity and I look forward to learning more about Lean as I continue my career here in the office of Continuous Improvement.

Almost every Monday, the Office of Continuous Improvement gives a short presentation during Michigan Tech’s New Husky Employee Orientation where we talk about Lean and it’s involvement on campus. Most employees do not have much, if any, experience with Lean so they are very surprised when they find continuous improvement is a requirement in their job description. Why is it important for employees to know about and be involved in Lean? Why isn’t it enough just to have management or supervisors experienced with Lean and its tools to use around the work space? Why is this so important to Michigan Tech?

The reason is that Lean does not work when it’s just one person making the decisions and changes. It’s not about a manager or supervisor controlling the situation, but instead about guiding others and seeing to it that Lean is being applied appropriately.

Lean is not just about its tools, processes, and methods, but it is its own culture. It’s this culture that allows for tools, processes, and methods to aid in creating an environment of continuous improvement. A large part of developing this culture is giving everyone the same opportunities and tools to make improvements, and this is what we explain to the newcomers. We explain that through Lean and coaching from those around them, they develop problem solving skills that give them autonomy within their jobs to implement improvement.

The overall benefit of employee empowerment is that it helps to form a Lean and Continuous Improvement culture that morphs processes through team work and communication into their most effective and efficient form, producing the most value for the customer. That is the goal of Lean and Continuous Improvement at Michigan Tech; to involve everyone in the process of producing the most value to its customers.

Written by Rylie Kostreva

We’re almost half way through the summer, and boy has it been a busy one. We PIC’s like to use the summer months to dive into projects and practice our lean thinking outside of the kaizen realm. This summer we’ve been working on a total of seven projects, all with one center subject, alignment. From better improving our personal task flow, to creating new processes to aid our lean practitioners on campus. We’ve been challenged, and inspired, to take our processes and align each towards one another, as well as to the goals of the Office of Continuous Improvement.

The first lengthy project that we’ve been working on is one that was initiated back in March and has just reached completion. We titled it, “Professional Writing Workshop.” This project was launched after recognizing that all the PICs wrote in a different format and had a different understanding of what “professional” writing meant. On day one we sat down and started our workshop with an affinity diagram, answering the question, “What does professional writing mean?” This helped us to identify our current state, where we all aligned, and where we were different. Then we researched professional opinions on what it actually means to write professionally. From there we evaluated our historical standards, made changes, executed a kata run, and finally decided on a new standard.

The second project that we’ve been working on as an entire office is the Lean Lending Library. This was initiated back in February and was our first project that strives to practice incremental improvements. This brand new resource is a library of activities. Ones that our office has hosted in the past, and are available to be checked out by other people to host the activity themselves. The library consists of an activity instruction sheet that guides the borrower through the entire activity by providing preparation considerations, materials, and instructions. We completed an inner-office kata run and now we are in the process of having a handful of volunteer facilitators run through a kata.

The third big project that is on-going, is really two that became sisters, PIC board Breakdown and PIC standards. After noticing some disturbances in flow that kept repeating, we decided it was time to reevaluate our PIC processes, these processes were homed by two whiteboards. Dominique and I sat down for a few hours one day and walked through all of the pieces of the board, taking careful note of areas that we identified as being difficult, unclear, or unnecessary. From there we asked, “What items would be better? What things do we do regularly practice that aren’t captured here?”  Then we drew up specific things we’d like to add and ideas we wanted to explore. We requested a single, larger whiteboard to create a more friendly canvas and rearranged our board categories into a more thought-out way. The items we look at daily were moved to eye level, our metrics became the center focus, the items we look at monthly moved slightly above eye level, and we created a larger area to note action items. This dissection of flow lead into questioning our current standard practices, and from there we followed a similar process to that of the professional writing workshop and have been working on developing better, more accurate written standards of the PIC duties.

These are just a few of the projects we’ve been working on this summer to create a better experience for the employees and the guests of the office of continuous improvement. Not only has the process become more effective and efficient, but there’s also been an unexpected, yet positive, result from it. Our communication skills amongst one another have increased drastically and our comradery has grown immensely.