About the Author - My Journey to Become a Successful Lean Practitioner
My first introduction to making improvements was as a new Airborne
Combat Engineer Lieutenant at Fort Bragg, NC. I was assigned to improve our Brigade equipment maintenance, which was failing combat readiness inspections. You don’t need to be brilliant to be successful; just be humble and focused. I partnered with our Army Maintenance Management Clerk and implemented ideas to organize and document the maintenance requirements for each piece of equipment to ensure combat readiness.
“The people doing the work have the best ideas.”
After serving four years in the Army parachuting out of airplanes, I took an assignment as the Pringles Potato Chip lab manager and Pampers production manager for Procter & Gamble in NC. One day, the boss announced that my next assignment was to be an Industrial Engineer. From then on, I adopted an Industrial Engineer mindset.
Until then, I had no knowledge of Lean or Continuous Improvement - only instinct. At Gillette in Andover, MA, I served 22 years as an Industrial Engineer, Senior IE, and then as a Project-level IE. When I started, there were 5 Industrial Engineers on the team. When I finished, there was just me, still getting everything done. During the last two years, my fortunes dramatically boosted when I helped Brian Durand initiate our lean journey at Gillette. Learning to implement lean tripled my value to the company. Later, P&G bought Gillette, and I was invited to serve as a senior IE, leading improvements at Amgen in RI.
I met amazing people at Amgen who entrusted me with my most significant projects - improving production cycle time and developing the groundbreaking “Observe Analyze Improve” approach to eliminating waste and workflow interruptions. This became the new, simple, direct approach to achieving lean results while avoiding the typical lean bureaucracy.
