Under Our Feet
It was late and one of the three-person teams had been watching the same team member load pallets of product onto trucks for six hours. It was the second day of the Continuous Improvement Kaizen event....
Blog Library
Be a Firefighter!
I often hear front line leaders labeled as firefighters, constantly moving from one problem to another in reactive fire-fighting mode. That label is actually not correct. You see, firefighters are one of the most...
Mad Max
“I’ve run this loading dock for 15 years but I never saw it like I saw it today. I hate it and it’s going to change!” Max was mad. He was the most experienced...
See Things That You Don’t
I’m often asked to explain what it is that we do to help warehouses reduce expenses. My answer is that we train their leaders to see things that they don’t. 1. Go and See....
The Angry Warehouse Manager
Carlos stood up. “We stopped auditing the meat cases months ago. It was waste.” John, the warehouse manager, looked like he was ready to explode. We were sharing findings at the end of a...
What Your Process Really Looks Like
When I ask someone in the operation why a certain task is done a particular way, I often hear them say, “because it’s common sense.” Then when I ask another person doing the same...
A Hatred of the Current State
“Raise your hands. Do you have a hatred of the current state?” A couple of hands went up. It was the last day of the Kaizen improvement event. “You just said you found that...
Bruce Trippet is President of OpportunityLinks LLC, a consulting company specializing in training, coaching and consulting continuous improvement transformations.