Happy New Year! Welcome to the January 2009 edition of our monthly newsletter, Learning to Lean. In this month's edition, we focus on kaizen events.

Announcements

We have recently announced dates for our 2009 lean manufacturing and lean office certificate programs. Below is our 2009 schedule of lean workshops. All sessions will take place at the Doubletree Club Hotel Orange County Airport in Santa Ana, CA. The lean manufacturing certification program is $2695 per person; the lean office program is $1595 per person. Single-day workshops are now available for online registration as well. Click on the dates below for registration.

Course (Click course name to download description, click date to register)	Date
Lean Certification Program - Spring 2009	Feb 11-12; Mar 11-12; Apr 8-9; May 6-7
Lean Office Certificate Program- Spring 2009	Feb 11; Mar 10-11; May 7
Introduction to Implementing Lean	Feb 11, 2009
Value Stream Mapping	Feb 12, 2009
Lean and Value Stream Mapping for Business Processes	Mar 10, 2009
Kaizen Events: 5S, Visual Controls, and Mistake Proofing	Mar 11, 2009
Quick Changeover and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)	Mar 12, 2009
Creating Continuous Flow Manufacturing Cells	Apr 8, 2009
Material Flow and Kanban	Apr 9, 2009
Lean Production Control and Inventory Mgmt.	May 6, 2009

Any of the above courses (plus many others) can be brought to your facility and customized to meet your requirements.

Click here for details on all of our training offerings, both on-site at your facility and public.

Kaizen

With the economic uncertainty of 2009, more and more companies will begin to rely on lean principles. Kaizen events are useful for making an instant impact on a single area for improvement. With proper planning, kaizen events can serve as a springboard to lean implementation.

In this issue, we feature three articles that should help you understand more about kaizen events. Firstly, we talk about the power of kaizen. In our second article, we talk about when kaizen events should be used. Our third article talks about planning and executing kaizen events.

The materials referenced in this newsletter will teach you more about lean. If you would like to learn more, feel free to call us at 866-559-5598 or visit our website and click on "Contact Us."

To subscribe to this newsletter, visit http://www.emsstrategies.com/newslettersignup.htm Please feel free to forward Learning to Lean to colleagues or use it in your publication. We only ask that you do so in its entirety.

EMS Consulting Group, Inc. - 7040 Avenida Encinas, Suite 104-189 - Carlsbad, CA 92011