TXM Represented at the 2016 Lean Transformation Summit
Robert Chittenden, TXM senior consultant, represented TXM at the 2016 Lean Transformation Summit, held in Las Vegas, USA March 17 – 18 2016, along with over 650 Lean enthusiasts from companies around the globe.
The keynote speaker was Jim Womack and he reminded the audience with his humble and pragmatic observations about the application of Lean in businesses in the West. It has now been 25 years since his ground-breaking book “The Machine that Changed the World” was released, and he challenges every member of the lean community to tackle the challenging task of improving the value creating work in every organisation, within the next 25 years.
Other presentations included case studies from Legal Sea Foods, redefining the way seafood restaurants work across the USA, and Phase 2, halving the cost of manufacturing their medical devices.
Robert observes that his key takeaway from the Lean Transformation Summit was the way Jim Benson, CEO of Modus Cooperandi, discussed how to map personal tasks onto a Kanban board which enables you to visualise the work ahead, limits the work-in-process and challenges your psychology of work for everyday tasks.
The final session of the summit highlighted the learnings from Thrustmaster of Texas and their journey to move from MRP scheduling to the background and bring forward FIFO, visual scheduling for high value, low volume manufacturing. They say dramatic results including 100% on-time delivery and reductions in cost.
Overall, Robert would recommend attending a Lean Enterprise Institute summit and conferences to remind us of why we do what we do, and making connection sight like-minded, improvement focussed people.
