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FIND YOUR SEAT

Lean In

College of Professional Studies bootcamp introduces key business management strategies

By Albert Stumm

New to her role as a quality improvement specialist at a children’s hospital in Wisconsin, Julie Gall, MBA, was looking for formal training that would help her make an impact on the job. With previous experience in both warehousing and pharmacy, she was familiar with the concept of a process-improvement methodology known as Lean Enterprise, but she wanted to learn more and get embedded in its techniques and tools. Enter ����ר��’s Lean Enterprise bootcamp, which—in just five days’ time—had Gall rethinking vaccine preparation at Children’s Wisconsin.

The learning-intensive course is just one in a suite of professional development programs and courses offered by the College of Professional Studies, designed to “create opportunities for students to get the skills boost they need to level up their careers,” says CPS Dean Christine Kelleher Palus, PhD. The bootcamp introduces a small group of mid-career professionals to management strategies called Lean and Six Sigma. Both strategies were designed to streamline manufacturing, but they increasingly have been adopted by health care companies and other industries.

“Lean is all about thinking differently and looking at your professional life and analyzing how to make things more efficient,” says Marv Meissner, professor of the practice and a recognized expert in Lean Six Sigma.

One place to start is with waste. “For every dollar that comes into your organization, you’re wasting 20 to 40%,” says Professor Meissner. “We teach people that there are eight forms of waste, which could come in the form of time, material or labor. Once we define these types of waste, people start to see it everywhere. We teach them not only how to identify waste, but also how to eliminate it.”

Students are introduced to the five principles of Lean—Value, Value Stream, Flow, Pull and Perfection—and perform exercises using numerous tools that correspond to each principle. To reinforce the concepts, Professor Meissner uses surprisingly simple yet relatable hands-on activities such as analyzing baking recipes and making paper airplanes. For Gall, it was an exercise in finding the most efficient way to stuff envelopes that led to her vaccine epiphany.

The students started working in large batches in an assembly line—folding the paper, filling the envelopes and sealing them—but found it was more efficient to process one envelope at a time. Gall says it was a counterintuitive lesson about wasted resources, one she then applied when working through a flu vaccine preparation and delivery process at the hospital. “The aha moment was when you think doing something in bulk is better in a workplace, but it’s not always,” she says, adding that the option of preparing and sending 10 flu vaccines at a time was rejected after learning this key point. “There’s too much risk for error with batching because then you have to touch it too many times, versus a one-piece flow that moves directly from the pharmacy to the nurse.”

In the case of making paper airplanes, Professor Meissner gives no instructions at first, resulting in vastly different designs and performance. Students then receive step-by-step instructions on how to build their planes with less variation. By the end, everyone’s planes essentially fly the same as students inch closer to the unattainable goal of perfection. “The Lean culture is something that never stops,” said Professor Meissner, who oversaw process improvement for a global manufacturer for 30 years. “You are always trying to get better and better.”

Professor Meissner stressed that Lean’s lessons also apply to your personal life. He offered the example that an organizational technique called the 5 S methodology–Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize and Sustain–works as well in organizing an office as it does in tidying a garage at home.

“Lean is a practice that gives you tools for your toolbox. As a practitioner, you need to learn when and where to apply the tools because each project is different,” says Gall. “Things won’t always go perfectly. You’ll have wins, but you learn through mistakes as well. Patience is a key factor in doing this work.”