The single most important thing manufacturing leaders can do to engage their employees is to share the ‘why’ behind their daily work, says Kathleen Skarvan, CEO at New Prague, MN-based Electromed—Quality’s 2021 Plant of the Year.

President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” This was his challenge to every American citizen to contribute in some way to the public good.

Lean approaches are beneficial for the development and maintenance of management systems compliant with ISO 9001, ISO 13485, ISO 14001 ISO 45001 standards and 21 CFR 820 FDA regulation.

As a Master Black Belt I teach Lean Six Sigma courses and often provide definitions of common terms. One such term is “value” which I define as the ratio between quality and price (value = quality/price).

“It may sound like an older version of the iPhone,” writes Dean Marsman in Quality, “but it’s actually a very simple and helpful system that can make the fundamentals of lean manufacturing even clearer to both business owners and employees.”

Quality professionals see many costs of quality firsthand. These include our salaries and benefits, the equipment used to measure and analyze quality outcomes, and the waste generated by these processes when they fail to meet requirements.

Sometimes adopting lean manufacturing means adding more people to a process. Eric Ethington, a lean product and process development coach, previously worked in the auto supply business. In a pump assembly product line, the typical cell had six operators.

I was recently retaught a lesson that, ironically, I teach for a living. The consulting firm I work in covers not only lean, but also consults and guides clients along with building and improving their quality management systems.

In a lean manufacturing process, a poka-yoke method is employed to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors in real time. Industrial engineer Shigeo Shingo first applied the term poka-yoke (“mistake-proofing” in Japanese) to the Toyota Production System. 

Lean and agile are well recognized in the manufacturing sector and in the quality community. Like many quality methodologies, lean and agile work in tandem and separately, depending on an organization’s needs. Where do these methodologies meet and diverge, what are their driving principles, and how you can add them to your toolbox (or convince others to do so)?