Who Should Attend:

• Company Leaders
• Improvement Team Leaders
• Improvement Team Facilitators
• Leaders responsible for identifying and training Improvement Team Facilitators

Seminar Outline:

A. Leadership and Guidance Team Work

team player roles - implementation plan - choosing pilot projects and teams - building your PDCA improvement process

B. Preparing Improvement Teams

company wide communications - improvement team training - team leader training - Improvement Team advisor training

C. Building Improvement Teams

learning to look for opportunities - using the PDCA improvement process - choosing and using quality measurement tools - improvement team dynamics - improvement team model of progress

D. Implementation Issues

sources of resistance

E. Planning Your Next Steps

prioritizing next steps

Seminar Format:

This seminar is most effective when company leaders and others responsible for planning and implementing improvement teams come as a team. Attendees receive a workbook which includes all information presented in the seminar and includes a bibliography and listing of resources.

A business argument for this work describes a company whose goal is to generate  more profit dollars, more extra money at the end of the year.  Let's imagine they're a $50 million revenue company earning 5% profit, or $2.5 million per year. They want to double their profit dollars.

One strategy would be to increase capital and headcount to increase the size and capacity of the organization to reach this goal. If the current system capability generates x and they want 2x, they need twice the revenue, i.e. $100 million in revenues.  But they would have to subtract the cost to double the organization’s capability, so in fact they would need even more revenues, an even larger organization.

Another strategy would be to target the 10-30% of an organization's revenue being spent on generating waste. This waste is often hiding in their company processes. Here they would maintain the size of the organization but deliberately improve it’s capability. To earn an additional $2.5 million dollars, they would have to improve their processes only 5.3% ($2.5M new profit/$47.5M operating costs). Improving their processes only 10% would earn $4.7M extra profit dollars,  without extra headcount or additional capital in many cases; equipment is improved and not necessarily purchased.

This improvement can only occur when leaders and employees learn to think and act differently about waste:  

• what does it look like?
• where is it hiding?
• how can we reduce it?
• how can we maintain the new processes?

The joke goes, “When fish get together to talk about their problems, they never talk about the water.” This seminar teaches companies to talk about the water.

Think of “acceptable scrap” as an oxymoron.