Welcome to the new blog.
This is a blog about Lean and Genoa Design International Ltd.
I plan to post my thoughts, insights, failures, successes, frustrations and celebrations surrounding the implementation of Lean in our company.
I will not bore you with a definition of Lean. Go look it up. www.google.com
I will not bore you with what Genoa Design does. Go look it up. www.genoadesign.com
I will, however, bore you with a brief history of Genoa and Lean as the intro to this whole blogging exercise.
I believe that Genoa Design is one of the first companies in Canada, and possibly the United States, that is trying to implement Lean in a marine and shipbuilding engineering service environment. Dave Hogg has mentioned to us that we are generally the first ones to try to tackle engineering activites.....we'll see.
We started this whole Lean stuff in 2002 with a simple introduction to Lean. This was through one, then another, then another, workshop and conference and industry conference. I believe one of the first was the Ship Production Symposium held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. CME also provided a number of workshops here in Newfoundland that introduced me to Lean. Basically, I was the only person from Genoa Design to attend and learn at this point. This was mostly a financial restriction.
In 2003, I attended a Technology visit program in Toronto, where a number of individuals representing different companies and industries in Newfoundland, visited a series of companies in the greater Toronto area, all of who were members of the HPM Consortium. I also attended various other workshops, which were mostly sponsored by the local CME branch, and attended the "Measure Up For Success" conference in Toronto...a major annual Lean conference held in Canada.
Within Genoa Design, we formed a Continuous Improvement Team, and loaded all staff on "Lean 101". We joined CME (Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters) and helped to form a brand new Lean Consortium in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Fluent Consortium.
Since then, we have been through numerous Kaizens and internal continuous improvement intiatives. We have tried to sustain our lean improvements, and have failed. However, we keep trying.
I think we have the right formula to start again and properly sustain this time.
We have not abandoned our improvements to date. We have not started over completely. But we have made one major change, and that change is....we have hired a Lean Consultant. Ken Hogan used to be a part of our Consortium as an employee of Canada Post until his position was terminated. (A not-so-nice and short-sighted effect of Lean implemented by companies that don't quite have the concepts of Lean straight). We met with Ken shortly after his departure from Canada Post, and now Ken has decided to operate as a consultant. He spends two days per week in our shop.
Ken has been working on analyzing gobs of data we have been collecting for years, concerning all the hours we spend toward the various tasks required to complete our projects. So far it has managed to cross his eyes and keep him awake at night, however he is getting close to understanding what might constitute a TAKT Time. Ken believes that TAKT time is the secret to our success. But TAKT time has eluded us through the years.
Good place for the cliff-hanger....stay tuned for the next entry.
I think that about does it for the first entry.
I am also going to have Ken post entries.
Together, we may be able to provide some insight into our efforts and how confused we manage to get when trying to Lean out our complicated little process...
Good night all,
Leonard
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