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Applying Lean Thinking to Demand and Supply

By Jon Miller - May 4th, 2020

Lean management is mainly associated with making operations more productive, improving safety, quality, speed and thereby lowering cost. Lean management originated from innovations in the supply chain. More recently, lean thinking has

What Are Hypothesis Tests and Why Should We Care? – Coronavirus Edition

By Ron Pereira - May 1st, 2020

As more and more medical studies related to potential Covid-19 treatments are released in the coming days, weeks, and months, you’re sure to hear terms like “significance” and “P-values” mentioned many tim

Condition-Based Management, in Times Like These

By Jon Miller - April 27th, 2020

The format of the 2020 NFL draft was different due to social distancing requirements. Instead of players and announcers on stage, spectators in the audience, and live interviews, we tuned into the home offices of coaches, personnel man

Be Deliberate About Your New Normal

By Steve Kane - April 24th, 2020

We’re at a point with the world’s current events that some governments are beginning to relax isolation orders and business restrictions. It would be easy to think that we might be getting back to normal soon. The harsh rea

Extremely Long-Cycle Standard Work

By Jon Miller - April 20th, 2020

The benefit of standard work, and good standards in general, is that it frees us to from having to figure out or to remember how to do things correctly. Good standards help us quickly distinguish between normal conditions and abnormal

Vaccination, Knowledge Reuse and Organizational Learning

By Jon Miller - April 13th, 2020

Animals and other organisms that are capable of learning acquire problem solving ability in several ways. They may do so through trial-and-error, via observation and social learning, or even from the sudden appearance of insight on how

Restart to a Future State, Not the Previous State

By Kevin Meyer - April 10th, 2020

One of my favorite books is Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. When I first read his book several years ago it put a new spin on lean’s perspective on waste and value by applying similar concepts to

Reflections on Four Weeks of Sheltering in Place

By Jon Miller - April 6th, 2020

Washington State has been officially sheltering in place since March 23rd. It feels like six week ago. Perhaps this is because we eased into social distancing a couple of weeks earlier, seeing the writing on the wall. The governor exte

How to Manage Chaos & Uncertainty

By Ron Pereira - April 3rd, 2020

One of the most efficient ways to work through an obstacle, or uncertainty, is to learn as fast as possible through experimentation. I think it’s safe to say that most of us have been facing lots of change and uncertainty over the la

Now More Than Ever, Huddle Daily as a Team

By Jon Miller - March 30th, 2020

One of the challenges we face when working from home, or as part of a virtual team, is staying connected with people on the team. Today more of us than ever are in this situation for the first time due to stay-at-home orders related to

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