Chrysanthemum Germplasm Bank Kaizen

Wow!

What a busy three days! We did a kaizen in the germplasm bank. It's an amazing process in-and-of-itself, but looking at the process through the lens of Lean really turbo-boosted the whole experience.

We did our training, with the Lean Lego factory, a couple of weeks earlier. Then Cecilia and I worked through a Pre-Scoping & a Scoping process.

I've got to thank Beau Keyte for his excellent training and insight into the Scoping process. It really helped us bring the voice of the customer into the kaizen, and laid the ground work for customer driven specifications. More on that in a later post.

We developed a current state Value Stream Map (VSM) of the process. I had video taped a few key elements of the process earlier, so we were able to observe the process with up to 11 people in the spacious conference room. We would not have been able to cram 11 people around a hood.

Then we walked through the Value Stream Questions, and developed the Future State VSM, prioritized our 10 projects, and broke up into team to attack the problems.

• One team worked on developing Standard Work for the retrieval process.
• Another team worked on work station design (cell flow) under the hood.
• And the third team worked on defining storage locations in the cooler layout.

This was one of the best teams I've ever worked with. They grasped key Lean concepts and were able to make some insightful, powerful application to this lab process. Great job Team! And thanks Cecilia & Mary for all your guidance and support.