Make sure you sign up here to receive the link for the webinar tomorrow: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2553236811879021570
Lean Into the New Year!
Strap on your seat belts and get ready for a fast-paced and interactive 45 minute brainstorming session about the best way for a company to launch a year of lean initiatives. We will start with a baseline set of monthly topics as the "straw man", add others and maybe subtract a few, rank them in terms of which should be done in what order, and share supporting stories about why which worked how (whew, a mouthful).
Ice Breaker (email them in to save time, we will publish to the group): Favorite Lean story of the 2017 holidays, whether work related or personal.
Happy Holidays and a Happy and Lean New Year to you all!
Bio and Background: Kathy Malone got her BSE in Environmental Engineering from the Interdisciplinary Engineering Program at Purdue, followed by 2 years of Master's work in Chemical Engineering also from Purdue.
She has been passionate over her entire 30 plus year career about helping improve systems, whether operations or electronic, to make jobs easier for the people who do them. Successful projects at the same time provide the workers with better information so they can perform their jobs more safely and provide everyone with better metrics.
After her original stint in a mile square automotive plant where they cast engines at one end of the plant and drove cars off the other end, and did everything in between, she started consulting, just as the environmental regulations were being passed. She started out doing Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure (SPCC) Plans, added Waste Management as those regulations came out, added Chemical Management when HazComm was on the horizon, then spent many years integrating and optimizing the interfacing of these systems with core facility operations systems.
Fun (Lean) projects have included:
- Automotive Assembly Line Job Hazard Assessments, reduced keystrokes by more than 80% while providing better information to the workers and for trainers
- Maintenance equipment SOPs, created and implemented a system where the operators read (and corrected!) the SOPs
- Chemical labeling, helped build a low tech, low cost, easy to use system that got client the best internal corporate audit score for OSHA transfer containers ever awarded (they found a bar of paraffin wax not labeled).
- Barcode labeling, designed and helped implement a simple barcode labeling system that reduced annual chemical inventory time by 90%, while providing hazmat responders with the location of some chemicals that become contact sensitive over time
- Purchasing systems, integrated with environmental reports, reducing time for regulatory reports from 8 people 2 months to 1 person, 10 days
She also has a horse farm where Lean helped them go from 2 people full time to run the farm to 1 person 1 hour per day (and where the horses are happier and healthier in the process). Her horse farm hosts HIdden Promise LLC, which does mental health counseling and develops and conducts wellness programs with the horses as facilitation partners.
