Kaizen Success Stories
Real Manufacturing Results. One Kaizen at a Time
Explore real-world Kaizen success stories showing how manufacturing teams solved critical problems, improved performance, and created sustainable results.
Four Teams, One System
How a cross-functional team transformed a complex business process into an integrated system in just three and a half days.
The Day I Stopped Fixing Barcode Readers
I thought my job was to fix barcode readers. Instead, a warehouse full of employees taught me one of the most important lessons of my career: the best improvements begin by listening to the people doing the work.
When My Design Didn't Win
I believed I had designed a better solution. Leadership chose a different direction. What happened next taught me one of the most valuable leadership lessons of my career: once the decision is made, your job is no longer to be right, it's to help the team succeed.
Five Tips for Effective Meetings
Have you ever had a meeting where it seems like nothing was accomplished? Is every meeting this way for you? Do your meetings start late? I have facilitated hundreds of meetings and Kaizen events and have learned over the years these five key tips to an effective meeting.
A Picture is Worth More than a Thousand Words – It’s Priceless
Earlier this year, I received an email from someone I never met, asking about my approach to 5S – organizing a workspace to improve safety and productivity. He heard about me from another location in his company, who I helped six months earlier. Later that week, we were in a Zoom meeting, and he invited me to his factory in Oregon to see if I could help jump-start their 5S efforts.
The Journey of 100 Google Business Reviews
When I opened my business, I tried many ways to attract clients. After spending money on advertising that didn’t lead to business, I focused on delivering a great customer experience and then let my business grow organically through word of mouth and referrals. This is a slower path, but it fits my principles of how I want to conduct my business.
When You Want Something Done Right – Outsource It
I was asked to create a discrete event simulation program for a planned factory expansion many years ago at Armstrong World Industries. What is that, you may ask? Basically, it’s a computer model of a process as it operates. It tries to mirror the behavior of the process, allowing the user to try various “what if” scenarios, such as adding capacity, downtime, resources, or speed. Having not built any simulations since my college days, I started doing research on options and whether or not I should try to build it myself or hire an outside vendor.