Lesson three, all team members are able to explain ci theory, principles and processes. So one of the things that I would absolutely expect to see when I come around to your business and you show me and say, Hey, Steven, I believe this is a culture of continuous improvement. What I'd expect is that I could go to members of the team, and they'd be able to explain to me some basics around ci theory, principles and processes. So we're going to talk about that now. So before I go on, I will acknowledge that Strictly speaking, the fact that people have knowledge isn't necessarily a behavior, but it's so important that I'm going to include it in this course and I'm going to dedicate quite some time to it. Because without people having that basic competency and knowledge, expecting them to get involved in ci is going to be very difficult.

So, I'm going to include that in this program and talk to you about some of the bits of knowledge that I would recommend that you give people in order to create a culture of ci. So things that you need to do in order to make that happen, some basic training, have some sort of test or assessment after that training to make sure that people do understand. Use the lingo, as we say, or the language so there's a set of language around ci, it's worth people being able to explain and use give people practice let people have a go. Communicate the process and communicate what is happening and what has happened. So in terms of making sure that people are able to explore theI theory principles and processes, you need to make sure that you get some basic training, and that you have a test or assessment after that training to make sure that people understand.

So what I want to go through now is some basic elements to that training. What would you expect to train people? What do you need your team to know? Firstly, I'd expect them to know what the word lean means. I'd expect them to be able to explain what waste is according to lean. What value means, from a lean perspective?

What are the seven classic wastes? What is continuous improvement? And what are the six steps to delivering an improvement project. So we're going to go through each one of these now. I'm going to give you the answers to these questions so that you can make sure that every member of your knows the answer. And the other thing that this section of the course will do, essentially it gives you the content of your test or assessment.

So let's start with what lean means. So lean is really a way of thinking, which started in the car industry, but is now used across industry and organizations throughout the world. And it focuses on reducing waste in all its forms. So what is waste? waste is anything that you do, that does not add value to the product or service from the point of view of the customer. So waste isn't just things that you throw away physically, but it's any activity is any effort you're putting forward or indeed, materials that are not adding value to the product or service that the customer is buying.

Another way to describe It's things that customer is not willing to pay for. The description of waste includes the word value. So waste is anything that is not adding value. So what does value mean? value is activity, efforts or transformation that the customer is willing to pay for. So the customer is willing to pay for the features and elements of a product and service that they see as value.

Other things that you might be doing, like waiting for materials, or moving stuff around all of that sort of stuff is as far as a customer is concerned of no value to them. So we mentioned about the seven classic ways, easy way to remember the seven classic ways are to remember the acronym Tim wood, and that stands for transport. Transport is when you're moving stuff around, in order to deliver to the customer but the actual moment moving stuff around within your internal processes is considered way. So that could be moving materials moving finished goods, moving information. So it doesn't have to be for manufactured goods, it could be information. The I stands for inventory.

So inventory is when you've got a store. And again, it could either be physical stock, or it could be other stock. It could even be intellectual property that you're holding, without actually doing anything for you. Anytime that you've got anything in your inventory is actually waste. Of course, you need a certain amount in order to replenish. But that's where things like just in time come in, which we'll talk about in a moment.

Motion. So transport is primarily around moving things around and materials and information. Whereas motion is generally around moving people around. So that could be Literally moving from one location to another as an individual, or it can even be just the action of doing something. So the more motion there is the more wasted effort there is. Waiting kind of speaks for itself, waiting for information waiting for materials waiting for the Go ahead, waiting for people.

All of that is waste. overproduction, making more of what the customer wants or making more than they want more than you can shift. Obviously, that tends to increase inventory, or it can just generate waste which gets thrown away or discarded, over processing, doing more to the product or service than you need to do. And finally, defects when the product or service is not fit for purpose, which means that the customer is unhappy, they may well reject or send it back. So those are the classic ones. Good for people to know that, because what you're looking for is for them to identify any of those ways that identify any of those ways you potentially have on your hands a continuous improvement project.

So it's good for people to understand what ways are, because they can then target those and come up with ideas. So what is continuous improvement, or continuous improvement is a process of small improvements or incremental steps, where waste is gradually reduced. So that's ci, sometimes there are transformational projects. But we're talking here about a culture of ci, a culture of continuous improvement, which means we're really looking for members of our team to get involved in this small step by step improvement. So what are the six simple steps to ci? Well, there's quite a lot of ways of approaching ci but This is the way that I use in my practice with a company called pro pack.

And the first thing I start off with is understanding why I need to change something. So that's really where the seven wastes come in. Is that shows me my business reason why I need to change something. So after I've identified why I need to change something, I do a current state analysis, which is about measuring understanding what's happening, being able to measure the amount of waste in whatever form that is, and I also do some root cause analysis to try to find out exactly what is the root cause of the waste. Then we identify what the goal is to remove X amount of waste to remove X amount of extra effort to reduce the lead time bisection search so we come up with a goal of the improvement. We then identify an plan what we're going to do to put that right.

We then implement that plan. And we review what we've done with our mind to seeing if there's anything more we can do. So it's really good if you can train your team with those basic six steps. So I very quickly run through the the things that I would suggest you train your people in. So some of those things you could do fairly quickly. Some might require a bit more time.

But giving people that base knowledge means that everybody's equipped to get involved in continuous improvement. And if you want a culture of ci, then you're going to need that base knowledge for people to be able to operate within that framework.