Sally worked many years in the hospitality industry applying Lean Six Sigma, and she shares her experiences to improve the guest experience. She also shares an example of a project that determined the optimal reward points to get customers to agree to reduced or no housekeeping, which was good for the environment, resulting in less linen being washed and less ergonomic risk to housekeepers. She has recently retired, and is now involved in helping nonprofits apply Lean Six Sigma methods. She...

In this podcast, I share the presentation given by my peers who helped us create the Lean Portland group back in 2015. They gave this presentation at the Lean Global Connection on November 30, 2023. It is a free annual online event put on by the Lean Global Network (LGN). The event took place over a 24-hour period. All the presentations were recorded, and I encourage you to check out all the presentations on their YouTube channel. LGN is a “consortium of not-for-profit organizations...

In this podcast, I share the presentation I gave virtually at the Lean Global Connection on December 1, 2023. It is a free annual online event put on by the Lean Global Network (LGN). The event took place over a 24-hour period. All the presentations were recorded, and I encourage you to check out all the presentations on their YouTube channel. LGN is a “consortium of not-for-profit organizations dedicated to advancing Lean Thinking and Practice throughout the world to make things...

In this podcast, I share an interview I had with Reed Harrison, Executive Director of Mind Matters Portland, and Maria Grzanka, a process improvement expert and prolific volunteer in Portland, Oregon. Reed worked in Supply Chain management and Operations with major companies like Adidas and Columbia Sportswear, but ended up as Executive Director at Mind Matters Portland. Maria also had a career in Supply Chain, Logistics and process improvement and is now running her consulting...

In this podcast, I share a presentation that was Part 1 of a 2-part sustainability webinar series sponsored by Iowa Sustainable Business Forum and Iowa Lean Consortium (part of CIRAS). It was geared towards introducing those in sustainability roles to Lean methods, which have become some of the most popular improvement methods used in high-performing organizations in manufacturing, healthcare, government and many other industries. Lean is a continuous improvement method that applies to many...

In this podcast, I share a “Lean and Green” case study I supported for a prefab home manufacturer in California in 2020-2021. I was asked to speak to the Industrial and Systems Engineers class by Professor Corey Kiassat at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT. He contacted me after my presentation at the Lean Global Connection conference in 2022 and my first book Lean Six Sigma for Good, to see if I could share some more Lean and Green case studies. He is incorporating more sustainability into...

In this podcast, I interview Kerry Lewis Bass, who has many years of experience improving processes in the corporate world and within government agencies. He has recently launched his consulting business to assist leaders in an organization to “develop, and successfully implement, assess and improve operational strategy and initiatives.” We discuss his work in government with the Georgia Technology Authority, and specifically at the Georgia Department of Human Resources where he shared...

In this episode, I speak with David Saunders, who is a retired Quality consultant and has focused his next career on using improvement tools to reduce the impact of climate change. He is a Certified Climate Change Professional (CC-P) through the Association of Climate Change Officers (ACCO), and volunteers with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He shares his journey on how he has dedicated his life to using his quality skills to tackle one of our biggest challenges, climate...

In this episode, I speak with my good friend Billy Ingram, who is the Director of Lean Product and Process Development at Interface. We discuss his process improvement background prior to Interface, then talk about his current work that is extending the environmental sustainability vision provided by founder Ray Anderson. He has helped developed more sustainable carpet products, but also incorporated more social responsibliity in these projects, along with best practices in process...

In this podcast, I share a webinar held with Dr. Luciana Bardi and Darcy DeGeorge from the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport). MassPort is a state authority responsible for three airports including Logan International Airport, four maritime facilities as well as real estate in Boston. They give an overview of Massport along with the lean engineering and construction process improvements that were implemented in the past few years, and the results and impact of their improvements...

In this interview, I talk with Katie Anderson, a leadership coach who has extensive lean experience in healthcare, and author of the award-winning Lean management book, “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn.” She lived in Japan for many years, where she learned directly from John Shook‘s former manager, Isao Yoshino, and the book is a summary of the lessons she learned through his experience at Toyota. She has also volunteered her time on two nonprofit boards, and she shares Lean tips...

I’m very excited about episode 100, it’s a great milestone in any podcaster’s journey. Thank you for listening! It has taken many years to get to this, but it’s a sustainable pace that has worked for me, and why I feel that I can get to #200 someday. In this 100th podcast, I share a video of a speech I gave at the Lean Six Sigma World Conference in Orlando on March 16, 2023. Here is the abstract I submitted about the presentation. Process improvement specialists have had decades...

In this podcast, I share a video of a speech given by Andrew Parris, Process Excellence Manager at Medair. The presentation was given at the Berlin Science Week 2021 that was organised by ETH Zürich. Andrew discusses how continuous improvement and Lean can make nongovernmental organization (NGO) money go further. He also mentions there are similarities between NGO work and Lean: * Show respect for people * Make it simple and visual * The goal is to provide...

In this podcast, I was interviewed by Mark Dejong on his The Lean Effect Podcast back in June 2021 (episode 34). We talked about my journey from statistician to Principal Lean consultant, and how Lean Six Sigma is beneficial for the environment, and applicable to our personal lives. We also discuss wastes we normally don’t think about such as electrical power being used when no production was happening, and discussed a range of areas for the application of statistical techniques...

In this podcast, I talk to my friend, Joy Mason, CEO and founder of Optimist Business Solutions, and the founder of The Six Sigma Racial Equity Institute™ (SSREI), which is an innovative leadership program designed to upskill Black Women to be complex problem solvers. We discuss her background in continuous improvement, why she started Optimist after her retirement (and why she named it Optimist), what led to the creation of SSREI, along with some project examples. We discussed the...

In this podcast, I extract the audio from a published video by IISE that recapped our last volunteer service project in Seattle in May 2022. We have been conducting these volunteer events prior to each annual conference since 2012, and this was the first one we’ve had since the pandemic. You can read about prior IISE volunteer events here. In this episode, we hear from the event organizer Dustin Diep, one of our long-time volunteers Maria Carolina Diaz, and Jesse Duran, the store...

In this podcast, I interviewed Jenelle Zito, who is the Director Of Continuous Improvement at Racine Unified School District (RUSD). Prior to joining RUSD about 5 years ago, she implemented process improvement at Gateway Technical College as a Quality Champion, after earning her Lean Six Sigma Green and Black Belt certification. She shares examples of projects she worked on, along with kaizen events she helped facilitate within each school system. Some of the projects include improving...

In this podcast, I interviewed Jorge Perez, who is the President & CEO of YMCA of Greater Cincinnati. Early in his career, he helped students into college and keep them from getting into drugs, gangs and dropping out of school. He realized that getting to the root cause of the issue (not having a support structure) would be more impactful, which eventually led him to the YMCA. He obtained his Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt certification and started applying these methods to his work...

In today’s episode, I share a presentation from the IISE Seattle conference on May 23, 2022. Joshua Fowler from Romac Industries starts off the presentation by giving some background on the project that I was involved with as the lean consultant, and Michael Johnson from Lean Environment Inc. discusses the technical solutions applied to reduce wastewater by 50%, with cost savings of $50,000 in 2021. You can also watch the video of this presentation at...

In today’s episode, I interviewed Elisabeth Swan, who has over 30 years of process improvement experience with a great background working for consulting firms like Rath & Strong and Pivotal Resources. She has lots of experience working with nonprofits, government, hospitality, healthcare, entertainment (including work on “Saved by the Bell”), and the for-profit sector. She teaches Lean and Six Sigma at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), is the co-host of the podcast and video...

In today’s episode, I interviewed Tracy O’Rourke, who has over 20 years of process improvement experience, working with nonprofits, government, education, military and the for-profit sector. She teaches Lean and Six Sigma at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), is the co-host of the podcast and video series, Just-in-Time Cafe (with Elisabeth Swan), and is a co-author of the book, The Problem-Solver’s Toolkit: A Surprisingly Simple Guide to Your Lean Six Sigma Journey. You can...

In today’s episode, I share the interview I had with D.J. Vagnetti, host of the Environmentally Conscious Nation podcast. I don’t think his podcast is still active, otherwise I would recommend listening directly to the episode. This interview assumes that the audience doesn’t know much about process improvement or Lean or Six Sigma, so if you know someone who cares about the environment, it might be a good episode for them to hear. If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us on...

Today I recapped the last year, and give some insights into my plans for 2022. It’s a shorter episode than usual, so hopefully you have time to listen to it during the holidays. I recap the past podcast episodes that I released, along with ones I was interviewed on. I also discuss the LeanSixSigmaForGood.com and LeanSixSigmaEnvironment.org website updates, discuss nonprofit volunteer work with Lean Portland, my client work related to environmental reductions and work with nonprofits...

Our guest is Hugh Alley, an experienced lean practitioner and industrial engineer, who has experience with the Toyota Kata method of improvement. He has recently applied this approach to a nonprofit food bank in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada called Loaves and Fishes. This approach was based on the KataLab approach developed for the food bank Moisson Montréal by Jean-Marc Legentil, Marc-Olivier Legentil and Sylvain Landry. He shares the following information during our...