In this testimonial, the Director of Logistics at Textron Specialty Vehicles (TSV) shares her experience working with MAU as an outsourcing partner.

For freedom-loving rebels, obeying rules is a behavior at odds with the attributes that make a rebel a rebel: willfulness, deviance, self-preservation and nonconformance. I’ll point out the obvious that rebels don’t do “conformance” well. Rules, on the other hand, require conforming behavior in the form of instruction that calls for unyielding compliance.

Linking your lean journey toward striving for operational excellence should be one of the organization’s key goals.

Workplace safety often makes us think of slips and falls or sprains and strains. We think of faulty ladders or electrical wiring in an industrial facility. Rarely do we consider an office environment, at which an employee spends the day in front of a computer screen typing away, as high safety risk.

You will probably agree that standardization is vital to the success of an organization, andthat standardization is truly fundamental within an organization in order to sustain operational excellence. After all, isn’t operational excellence the ultimate goal of every company that is on a lean continuous improvement journey?

Do you listen to classic rock?  I freely admit that I do quite regularly.  I love to hear Roger Daltrey of The Who bellow this probing question: Who are you?

When reviewing your “Lean System”, think about how well it can (or cannot) identify problems and then solve them. For example, if you want to continue to move your lean system forward, contemplate how companies can better engage ’Hearts and Minds’ of their front line employees.

At MAU, our first core value is “We Live Safety”! In order to get the most out of your contract workforce, we feel that safety must be a top priority for all employees.

In today’s modern world where creativity, ingenuity and pursuit of the “new” and “different” rule our psyche, do we hastily devalue classics? Are the Proven, Tried and True too often passed over for the unique “new thing” that nobody has thought of yet?

The risk that we need to avoid here is looking for the ‘’breakthrough’ in one big step. Not only is this almost always impossible, but it is dangerous. A new term has recently been added to the lean vocabulary: Kaikaku. While kaizen is a focused incremental change for the best, Kaikaku means making fundamental and radical changes to a production system.

I want to take a moment and challenge you to look at the why first as opposed to the what. Often when driving a lean continuous improvement project you can hit some negativity or proverbial wall which is hard to pass thru. When this happens, shift your focus from looking at what went wrong and what changes we can make to prevent it from happening again but rather to the why value proposition. Starting with the why process is important to further the relationship and impact to the real value added. By focusing on the why before looking at the 8 wastes you are in a better position to define real value and lead the team to find the what.

I love to take analogies from sports and apply the successful concepts to lean and continuous improvement. This one may require you to stretch your mind a little, but I believe you will agree consistency of commitment over time is critical in all that we do to be successful. It’s an old cliché you hear repeated over and over, “Defense Win Championships”. The thing about defense is that it doesn’t take superstars, but a group of teammates with well-choreographed movements who end up eventually stifling the offense. Everyone loves the flashiness of offense, high scoring is more exciting, but in the end it comes down to defense.