After attending general counsel conferences and reading legal department surveys, one clear message is that the legal department must accomplish more with a smaller budget and fewer resources. This is ...

According to Jeffery Liker’s book, The Toyota Way, it’s estimated that most business processes are 90% waste and 10% value-added work. Value-added activities in a process are considered those that ...

Originating from the Japanese term “Gembutsu,” “Gemba Walk” is essentially a lean management practice that has an organization’s leadership visiting the “actual place” where work is done. This might ...

Knowledge and experience in quality and continuous improvement are highly valued by today's employers. The principles are being applied in engineering, healthcare, business, service, nonprofits, and ...

An agile approach gives you the chance to try new methods, while constantly reviewing progress. Unfortunately, that’s completely foreign to the way in which most businesses run. All too often, ...

OBJECTIVE: To develop multidisciplinary clinical process improvement methods using evidence-based medicine to decrease the incidence of pneumothorax in a NICU. STUDY DESIGN: All inborn infants <28 ...

Process improvement methods such as Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and ISO 9000-3 offer software developers a standardized framework for fine-tuning ...

There is a common lean phrase, “Bad systems beat good people.” Sometimes it is attributed to Dr. W. Edwards Deming although it isn’t actually his quote. I’ve used it for 20 years but couldn’t tell you ...

As health care architects we have noticed a trend over the past few years: health care organizations, after applying quality-improvement methods, are opting to upgrade their facilities. These methods ...