Lean Gurus

I had the opportunity to attend a two day training course put on by the Lean Enterprise Institute. This course was held at the Wells Fargo Imaging Production Facility in Eagan, MN in February 2007. The course highlighted the importance of being able to manage work and create standard tasks to reduce variability. This is an important concept of Lean: If the work processes are not standard then you cannot effectively measure and improve them. The instructor was Sammy Obara who is an associate with the Lean Enterprise Institute, and he is affiliated with HONSHA, which is a group of former engineers from Toyota. Sammy was very knowledgeable and he puts on a pretty good course. The only real criticism I found was that many of his examples were from Toyota that did not transfer well to service industry processes. However, if you are looking for a standard work course, his training is definitely thorough enough for most beginner to intermediate level Lean students.