The Lean philosophy requires an organization to create and sustain a problem-solving culture.
Within these cultures, visual systems enable employees at all levels to understand the goals for all enterprise processes. If the standard work for a given process does not achieve the expected goals, problem-solvers identify the nature of the process failure and the root cause of performance gap.
The problem-solving technique used by Lean practitioners is based upon the scientific method of problem solving made famous by E. Edward Deming. Deming’s “PDCA” is a structured methodology that eliminates the root-cause of problems using four key steps: Plan, Do, Check, and Act.
MRC’s Problem Solving course is a one-day classroom-training event in which participants learn to:
- Identify gaps between a process’ current state and desired state
- Create prioritized problem statements through journalistic questioning
- Conduct a root cause analysis to establish a hypothesis for the process failure
- Plan and execute countermeasures to eliminate failure root causes
- Evaluate countermeasures to prove or disprove hypotheses
- Modify countermeasures and create new standard work
MRC’s Problem Solving course teaches these techniques through a hands-on exercise. Participants use a standard A3-Style PDCA form to break down a problem and test potential countermeasures in a small-group setting.