Lean Manager Certification Program

Week 1 Curriculum

The first thing any organization needs to do is to create the strategic framework within which to define the correctness of tactical initiatives, the opportunities for improvement, and their relative importance and urgency. This will help an enterprise separate the urgent opportunities from the important ones and near-term efforts from those that require more learning.

The first week focuses on a system for creating the strategic objectives, connecting them to tactical initiatives, and centering an improvement plan on baseline metrics. Here the participants will use this system to generate information and formulate the sequence of activities to come. They will not yet actually be performing improvements.

The individual projects selected by the participants will be reviewed during this session for appropriateness and business value. The business benefit from all the LMAC curriculum will depend directly on the scope of the individual improvement project. (If necessary, the predetermined project can be changed based on the outcome of the first week's session.)

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Strategic Thinking

Learn how to integrate lean practices with the overall strategy of the firm. This module will focus on identifying how lean manufacturing contributes to building value for the customer. Through a business case study you will learn a framework for thinking about strategy from an operations perspective and a method for segmenting customers based on salient manufacturing characteristics. This knowledge will allow you to focus your efforts so that the lean transformation in your company translates directly to enhanced value for your customer. Module highlights: Strategic implications of lean transformation; determine what "wins" customer orders and what "qualifies" you to compete for those orders; segment customers based on key order winners and qualifiers; develop a model for integrating manufacturing and marketplace concerns; marketing lean throughout the enterprise and to customers.

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Organizational Innovation

The marketplaces of 2010 and beyond will be rife with competitive disruption and market context change. In this environment of continuous disturbance, the ability to improve current forms of value, although essential in a head-to-head competitive near-term context, will not assure survival or growth in the mid to long-term. To be successful, you must balance your improvement strategy (improvement of existing forms of value) with an innovation strategy (the ability to reliably, predictably, and quickly create new forms of value). Innovation provides a way to continually refresh your company’s value proposition and evolve your business model to be certain your improvement effort (Lean) is addressing the strategic, organizational, and cultural challenges necessary for sustainable growth. In this module, we will explore what it takes to create an enterprise-wide capability to consistently conceptualize, develop, and deliver to market new value by adapting and combining concepts that have been successfully demonstrated in other domains.

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Value Stream Management and Analysis

This module will lift-off the lean journey by presenting the step-by-step methodology of value stream management. Value stream management is the cornerstone to planning the implementation of all lean activities. Learn value stream mapping and story-boarding. Learn how to gather all the upstream and downstream information needed to make data driven decisions regarding your lean plan and the subsequent elimination of all non-value adding activities. In this module we'll consider measurements such as Dock to Dock, First Time Through, On-Time-Delivery, and Build to Schedule. The learning is business case based.

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Planning & Deployment

This module will detail the need for enterprise-wide waste elimination and demonstrate a systemic approach to get everyone in the enterprise involved in the process. Guided by the lean business case and the discipline of policy deployment, participants will learn how to align corporate objectives/initiatives with work place activities and day-to-day operations. We'll explore implementation roadmaps and application of the lean process improvement tool kit.

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Project Management & CEDAK

Success of your lean journey depends on how well you can position a process of continuous improvement, with everyone in the enterprise participating with simple and effective tools. Project management is central to continuous improvement. In this module we'll explore project management principles, success factors, management guidelines, the easy to use practices of monitoring project status, and the aggregate contribution to the company's improvement strategy/initiatives. An overview of the CEDAC methodology will be presented.

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Six Sigma (DMAIC, SIPOC)

Implementation of lean production flow requires process variation reduction. Six Sigma is a data-driven, project to project scientific method that reduces defects and waste. This module will explore the fundamentals of Six Sigma and the appropriate place to conduct Six Sigma analysis of a process or processes for your organization. Learn how to discover significant variables in a process and how knowledge of variation enhances management decisions and value to the customer. Through simulations participants will get a hands-on and visual demonstration of the Six Sigma methodology in action. An overview of the DMAIC methodology as well as the SIPOC process will be presented.

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Project Chartering

Project management is fundamental to a successful lean journey. A project charting process is fundamental to project management. This module introduces a framework that provides the documentation and guidelines that govern the successful identification, monitoring, opening and closing of lean projects.

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Homework

At the conclusion of each weeks training session, several homework assignments will be made. These assignments are structured to further reinforce the learning that takes place in the classroom sessions.

Homework assignments will include items such as gathering and analyzing information to facilitate planning for your transformation process, selecting an initial application (pilot) area, completing your current state value stream map, designing manufacturing cells, and implementing Kanban pull systems. At the time homework assignments are made, detailed requirement information will be communicated to each participant.

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Lean Manager Certification Program Curriculum

Week 1: Plan Week 2: Pilot Week 3: Deploy Week 4: Integrate