Welcome to the August 2010 edition of our monthly newsletter, Learning to Lean. In this month's edition, we will talk about using kaizen events for rapid, breakthrough improvements.

Announcements

We still have space available for our Fall 2010 Lean Manufacturing and Lean Office Certification programs in Orange County, CA. The schedule is below; click here for details.

Course (Click course name to download description, click date to register)	Date
Lean Certification Program - Fall 2010	Aug 11-12; Sep 8-9; Oct 6-7; Nov 3-4
Lean Office Certificate Program- Fall 2010	Aug 11; Sep 8-9; Nov 4
Introduction to Implementing Lean	Aug 11-2010
Value Stream Mapping	Aug 12-2010
Lean and Value Stream Mapping for Business Processes	Sep 8, 2010
Kaizen Events: 5S, Visual Controls, and Mistake Proofing	Sep 9, 2010
Quick Changeover and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)	Oct 6, 2010
Creating Continuous Flow Manufacturing Cells	Oct 7, 2010
Lean Production Control and Inventory Mgmt.	Nov 3, 2010

For those of you for which classroom training in Southern California is inconvenient, we continue to offer our online lean certification and training programs. These are currently 30% - 50% off through the summer. To learn more about online lean training including pricing, click here.

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

Kaizen Events

Kaizen Events have been utilized in the United States since the 1980's; unlike many of the other tools of lean, they are not directly taken from Toyota. The idea behind kaizen events is to get many kaizens (literally good changes) to a process to happen in a very short period of time (usually 3-5 days). Kaizen Events have great benefits; most notably, they result in rapid improvement and are a learning experience for participants. Kaizen Events, however, have gotten some bad press over the years: a company cannot "kaizen event" itself to being lean.

In this month's newsletter, we feature three articles that address the topic. First, we provide an article dealing with kaizen. Secondly, we talk about when to use kaizen events. Finally, we talk about planning and implementing 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