Five individuals certified as lean office champions by NMC Training Services
On Friday, September 21, Rich Wolin, Director of NMC Training Services certified five new Lean Office Champions from the region. Kay Hall of NMC, Deb Kimball of Munson Medical Center, Amanda Rommell of Paul Oliver Memorial Hospital, Crystal Bailey of NMC Hagerty Center, and Penny Saemisch of Kalkaska Memorial Health Center celebrated their completion of a six month, 96-hour program designed to train them to apply lean manufacturing principles to their office and healthcare workplaces. Two sessions are hosted by each organization, the classroom training involves intensive hands-on activities, and each champion completes several continuous improvement projects in their workplace. “By applying lean principles to the process, we were able to shorten the lead time for Practice Pro, our newsletter for local physician practices, from eight weeks to less than four,” said Deb Kimball, physician liaison at Munson Medical Center.
Lean principles are based on the Toyota Production System and began spreading throughout American manufacturing following James Womack and Daniel Jones’ seminal work, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation. In the last ten years, these principles have migrated from the shop floor into manufacturing offices, healthcare settings, and most recently service industries. By applying lean principles, one Wisconsin healthcare system has seen a decrease in deaths, wait time to treatment, and length of stay. All of this has resulted in a significant drop in cost of care.
NMC Training Services has been certifying lean champions for five years now, beginning with a year-long manufacturing series, of which 61 individuals have completed. The objective of the program is to enable companies to build internal capacity to support their continuous improvement journey. Two years ago Training Services started offering the lean program in its current six-month version to individuals from office and healthcare settings. Lead trainer, Heather Fraizer, PhD, acknowledges that even though the principles are the same, applying them in an information-based setting poses particular challenges. “Waste and work-arounds are more difficult to see in office settings and it helps to see examples from other offices,” said Fraizer. With the addition of the current champions, Training Services has certified 12 Lean Office Champions.
NMC Training Services offers a variety training and consulting services for organizational improvement including lean training and coaching. The next Champion certification opportunities are scheduled to start in December of 2012 for manufacturing and February of 2013 for service industries including healthcare. For more information or to register, please contact Vicki Rumbach at 5-2218 or vrumbach@nmc.edu. Additional information is also available at nmc.edu/training.