Nothing Fishy About Our New Lean Champion Awareness Consortium
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
While fishing may not have much to do with manufacturing, don’t let MassMEP’s new Lean Champion Awareness Consortium be “the one that got away!
For nearly three decades, MassMEP has been working with manufacturers to help them eliminate waste from their processes, cut costs, gain efficiency, and improve productivity to help their businesses grow and thrive. We coach employee teams during continuous improvement events throughout their facilities. Typically, the results are good and for a while the momentum continues. But, we all know how easy it is for old habits to creep back in as time passes. Sustaining the positive changes from your Continuous Improvement activities and keeping the CI momentum going can be like baiting a hook in the dark.
Do you have a continuous improvement program or a CI team? Would providing some of your employees with training to help them learn to run and monitor CI activities at your facility be helpful toward your business’ sustainment and growth?
Teaching Them to Fish
MassMEP has created the Lean Champion Awareness Consortium. We plan to run these consortium programs, in person, regionally because we believe that having the participants learn concepts and tools and then apply them hands-on, during actual improvement activities, is key to their continuing to do this critical work for your company in the future.
The syllabus for the training includes ten full-day sessions, spread over several months. Consortium participants will have input to the schedule. The ten days include: one day of Lean training with a hands-on simulation, a day of Team Building training and activities, two days of Value Stream Mapping done of a participating manufacturer’s problem/process, the fifth day the team discusses potential projects derived from the VSM and will have Kaizen training based on the projects they identify. Day six is Problem Solving and day seven is Standard Work Training. On days eight and nine the group will do a Kaizen event, identified during the VSM, at a participating manufacturer’s facility. Day ten, the final report out and presentation from the Kaizen will be completed and management representatives from each of the consortium companies will be invited to a completion/graduation event where the final project and an overview of what was accomplished during the program will be presented by the participants. The instructor will share ideas, tools and forms with the students throughout the training and can be available for check-ins as needed.
We will be utilizing Workforce Training Grant Funds, through a consortium grant to pay for the training. This will require each company to provide specific business documents to Commonwealth Corporation and provide them with information for the grant reporting. MassMEP will guide you through these details.
Have your improvement initiatives become a catch and release situation? Maybe you’re using the wrong bait. Try Lean Champion Awareness!
For more information contact Karen Myhaver at karenm@massmep.org or reach out to your MassMEP Business Development Manager or Project Manager.