Managing Daily Work in Lean Organization: Combining Operational Flows with Resource Flows, workshop by Dr. Gregory H. Watson

29.01.2020, Tallinn, Nordic Hotel Forum, Viru väljak 3

When things flow better systems are healthier. This is true of human systems where air, blood, and food must all flow to be a healthy person. It is also true of organizations. This seminar will begin with familiar territory – what does it take to have a healthy human body and then build this analogy into what it takes to have a healthy organization. Flow management is usually associated with the methods described as “Lean” production. These technologies concentrate on the flow of process actions for productive systems and include managing various flows: human flows, workflows, and product or service flows in the end-to-end delivery system of an organization’s outputs.

Application of this lean technology is related to the workplace and most effort is expended on developing worker competence in the fundamental toolkit of lean methods. However, this concentration is insufficient to achieve an enduring efficient and effective organization. Management activity must be coordinated to assure economic benefits are obtained and that the “lean” culture is established on a permanent basis. This requires integration of the resource flows with the operational flows. However, resource flows cannot be purely financial flows as decision rights and budgetary allocations both constrain how people can manage their daily work. Thus, the second emphasis in this seminar will be placed on understanding the way that resource flows operate conjointly with operational flows to create enduring efficiency – a cooperative system, not just cycle time reduction.

Finally, the integration of these flows in a management system described by the Japanese phrase “hoshin kanri” will be presented as the means by which these two flows can be concurrently managed to create “Constancy of Purpose” through enlightened managerial attention to the strategic components of the organization’s quality system.

Registration info is available at: https://www.eaq.ee/en/management-conference-flow-28-01-2020