Gemba sit is no option to “walk” digital processes

When I asked “Where will you Gemba Walk when most of the processes will be digitized?” in an article on this blog, one answer came back as doing “Gemba sits”. That is, sitting next to a person and observing how and what is done on the computer and with the phone. I guess that the …

Lean, Industry 4.0 and catalog shoppers

November 2020, the Lean Enterprise Institute posted a podcast with Mark DeLuzio, Art Byrne, and Jim Womack titled Lean Lessons From Danaher and Beyond. Among the lively exchanges between the guests, Jim Womack’s mention of Lean, Industry 4.0 and catalog shoppers caught even more of my attention. You may listen to the podcast here: https://www.lean.org/podcast/5418 …

Process Mining Software can draw your spaghetti diagrams

One underrated tool in the Lean toolbox is the spaghetti diagram. Usually long and requiring painstaking efforts to draw, it may be shown only once, but the displayed Current Reality in the single picture is well worth the thousand words, and the investment to draw it. In the digital age, spaghetti diagrams now come almost …

Process Mining is no substitute for investigating the gemba

When I started to share my thoughts about Process Mining vs. Value Stream Mapping, I figured this would be a two-articles mini series. But some readers’ comments inspired me to clarify one important thing: Process Mining is no substitute for investigating the gemba. Missed previous articles? Check out Is Process Mining the VSM killer? and Stop mapping, …

Is Process Mining the VSM killer?

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) may live its last years as a Lean favorite tool, challenged by the rising Process Mining. If my hypothesis will prove true, Lean practitioners will have to adapt, either learning to use this data analytics tool or teaming with data scientists to exploit it. Now this is not necessarily bad news. …

Will the fight against COVID-19 bring back 5S?

In April 2019 I posted an article titled Will 5S resist 4.0 tech? sincerely thinking 5S were doomed as 4.0 tech spread. Roughly one year later, May 2020, most countries of the northern hemisphere try to get back to a new normal after being locked down in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Lisez-moi en …

The blurring definition of waste in a 4.0 world – Part 2 of 2 – Robotic Process Automation

In part 1 of this series I took the example of Additive Manufacturing vs. traditional machining to explain the blurring definition of (Lean) waste and value. In this post, I propose another take with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With RPA, some tasks considered unnecessary and wasteful in the classic Lean point of view are automated …

Will 5S resist 4.0 tech?

April 2019, in the corridors of our offices I picked a statement made by a young consultant about one of his clients: "It's a real mess in their warehouse, they do not manage storage and have no defined storage locations. They lose an incredible amount of time searching for goods. Introducing RFID tags would allow …

Summer blog “logical” cleanup

Dear subscribers and regular visitors of this blog, you may have noticed over time the growing number of posts related to this fabulous logic tools called the Goal Tree. In order to facilitate navigation and tidying up my blog, I've created a specific category for Goal Tree-related posts as well as a category for the Goal …

Digital transformation: 5 good reasons not to ditch Lean too quickly

In the hype of digital transformation, the appeal of new technologies and the hope to buy turnkey solutions to lasting problems may eclipse the good old Lean, even so all the potentials of the latter haven't been fully exploited. Now here are 5 good reasons not to ditch Lean too quickly: Digitizing wasteful activities is …