AME is made up of people who are dedicated to enterprise excellence. Members, volunteers and staff all seeking best practices to implement lean and continuous improvement. This pursuit of operational excellence inspires us and keeps us driving toward agile solutions, tools and processes that help our organizations and colleagues work smarter and more efficiently and effectively.
But how do you identify excellence? And how do you keep your organization focused on achieving it for the long-term?
It’s not uncommon to struggle with this effort, especially as competing priorities, unforeseen situations and new people enter into an organization.
A roadmap is necessary to move you from point A to point B, to tell you what route to follow and even provide you details of where you’re headed.
At AME, we ground our work in the AME Lean Sensei™. The free tool is designed to help manufacturing and health care organizations benchmark off past AME Excellence Award recipients — a roster that includes O.C. Tanner, Starbucks, Aera Energy, Raytheon, STIHL, HM Electronics, MillerCoors, Accuride, Littelfuse, AGCO, Goodyear, and others.
You might not realize it, but our international conference tour sites are vetted against Lean Sensei™. Likewise, the entire conference program is created to offer best practices that align with Lean Sensei™ criteria. Beyond the conference, a team of volunteers and staff are working behind the scenes now to ensure all AME programs and events align with the Lean Sensei™ tool and that it’s clear to our members and the lean community what workshops, trainings, tours, webinars and events fit their areas for improvement.
In addition to the free Lean Sensei™ tool, we also provide training to keep you on the right path. Next week, for example, Mark Preston will lead a lean boot camp on December 10-11. The workshop will show different ways of addressing safety, quality, productivity, delivery, morale, cost and inventory by using lean tools and creative thinking.
To be most successful, you’ll also need to hone your assessment skills so that you can recognize excellence and identify areas for improvement. On January 13-14, AME is offering the opportunity to become a better enterprise excellence assessor. You’ll work through a case study with two of AME’s top excellence assessors and then going to the gemba — virtually, of course — at Hansen Plastics.
The success of our lean journeys is dependent on having the tools to identify how excellence looks, the skills to recognize areas for improvement and the roadmap to get our organizations where they need to go. I invite you to take this time at the end of the calendar year to attend our lean boot camp, work through the AME Lean Sensei™ tool, and then join us on January 13-14 as we help you improve your assessment skills. These simple steps will help set your course for 2021, and you and your organization will reap the benefits.
As always, please stay safe and keep looking out for one another.
