At AME, we like to think of ourselves as a connector that helps our members find great insights and actionable lessons. When you participate in a virtual tour, when you join and network with an AME consortium, when you attend our conference or a summit, and even when you benchmark off past AME Excellence Award recipients when using the AME Lean Sensei, we are connecting you to knowledge and practical know-how that you can apply directly in your enterprise.
But what you might not realize is that behind the scenes, AME is practicing what it preaches.
Just yesterday, Barb Clayton, our director of programming and integration (a volunteer role) and Laura Cloninger from our staff shared a new backend process for tracking and planning future events. The old process was ripe for improvement and Barb and Laura, along with AME’s director of conferences and events, Desiree Dolecki, came up with a new system to share this information with those who are creating events to help you share, learn and grow.
What’s special about this new system is that — just like when you go on an AME tour and see something you can apply in your organization — Laura, Barb and Desiree created our new system after seeing the AME Canadian Region’s system for planning regional events. And to take this one step further, the Canadian Region’s system was originally created by long-time AME staffer Sharon Halsey.
So what does this mean to you? It means that even organizations that preach continuous improvement, employee engagement and empowerment, lean processes, and people-centric leadership, need to be mindful of areas where they can improvement. You need to keep your eyes open and see where you might be deficient and what others are doing better. That’s where tours, workshops and practitioner presentations come into play, and AME is happy to connect you to these improvement ideas.
Sometimes those improvements can even come from within your own organization. In the example above, the improvement to our backend came because AME Canadian Region president Richard Evans and his team shared knowledge with Laura, Barb and Desiree. Where might you find examples of better processes in your own organization? As an added bonus, when you look for improvement ideas within, you just might break down some silos in the process.
Sir Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I believe this is 100% the case with AME. We stand on the shoulders of those who started and spread the lean, continuous improvement movement. People with names like Ohno, Deming, Womack, Bodek, and AME co-founder Doc Hall. And we stand on the shoulders of those who continue to iterate and improve on this foundation and evangelize about the importance of process improvement in manufacturing, health care, public sector and every industry. We’re happy to serve our community and help others see further.
Sign up for an upcoming AME event and you, too, will see further. Climb onto our shoulders, the view is spectacular.
As always, please stay safe and keep looking out for one another.
