Learn lean by doing, one guide at a time

A practical, example-driven guide to poka-yoke on a real production line — the three device types, where to place them, a worked station example, and the mistakes that quietly let defects through.

A practical guide to making OEE actually drive improvement on a production line — defining honest planned time, splitting Availability, Performance, and Quality, and the mistakes that turn it into a vanity number.

A practical guide to building standardized work on a real production line — takt time, work sequence, and standard WIP — written with operators, as the current best-known way and the baseline for kaizen.

A practical guide to walking the floor like a leader, not an auditor — where to go, what to look for, the questions to ask, and what to do after, so the walk actually changes the work.

A practical, gemba-tested guide to running a time study on a real production line — breaking the job into elements, timing a steady operator across cycles, and using the lowest repeatable time to set a standard you can balance against.

A practical guide to cutting changeover time with SMED — separating internal from external setup, converting work off the stopped machine, and the mistakes that keep changeovers long.

A practical, manufacturing-specific guide to the 6 Ms fishbone — sorting causes of a recurring defect or downtime, then drilling with 5 Whys to a root you can design out, not an operator to blame.

A practical guide to running real kanban on a production floor — production vs. withdrawal cards, the supermarket, capping WIP by card count, and sizing cards from demand and lead time.

A practical guide to putting takt time to work on a real production line — setting honest available time, balancing stations, and the mistakes that quietly break the pace.

The Six Sigma tools organized by DMAIC phase, taught by doing: follow a machining cell scrapping 4.2% of its housings through Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. Draw the project scope, watch gage error inflate the data, drill a Pareto into a verified root cause, move Cpk with two sliders, and see what frozen control limits catch that a monthly report misses.

A practical guide to visual management on the plant floor — the display/control/system hierarchy, the 31-second test, tiered huddles, a worked audit, and the traps to avoid.

An interactive guide to writing work instructions the Training Within Industry (TWI) way. You are the instructor: prepare the worker, present the job, build the three-column job breakdown — important steps, key points, reasons why — and try it out on an apprentice who performs only what you wrote.

A practical, healthcare-specific guide to running 5S in supply rooms, med rooms, and on crash carts — with a sample audit, a worked example, and the mistakes that quietly sink most programs.

A practical guide to using a fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram in healthcare — choosing care-fit categories, finding system causes instead of blame, and the mistakes that stall most analyses.

A practical guide to value stream mapping a patient journey — tracing one path from arrival to discharge, finding where the hours actually hide, and designing a future state that takes the waiting out.

A practical guide to running an A3 in a hospital — writing a problem statement that holds up, grasping the current state at the bedside, finding true root cause, and proving countermeasures before you scale.

An interactive guide to value-stream mapping in healthcare. Follow one patient through an emergency department, build the current-state map with a cross-functional team, see why information is right only 17% of the time, and redesign the journey from seven hours to two.

A practical, warehouse-specific guide to running 5S across receiving, put-away, picking, packing, and shipping — with a sample audit, a worked example, and the mistakes that quietly sink most programs.

A practical guide to pull-based pick-face replenishment with kanban — sizing two-bin signals, replenishing on a milk-run, and the mistakes that turn pull back into push.

A practical guide to the 7 wastes (TIM WOOD) in construction procurement and field work — with observation questions, a worked PO waste walk, and the traps to avoid.

A practical guide to running a fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram on a real restaurant problem — the right cause categories for a kitchen, a worked taco-line example, and how to drill to the root instead of blaming the new cook.

A practical guide to value stream mapping an insurance operation — tracing a claim through queues and handoffs, finding where the days actually hide, and designing a faster future state.