Modern Management Methods: Lean Kanban North America 2014

This session provides a quick case for change for organizations that seek to understand how to move beyond budgets. It shows how to create more effective controls by moving beyond budgeting. In this session you will:

-          Learn how to create a quick case for change to help you focus on your organization.

-          Review the 7 common pitfalls of traditional budgeting

-          Examine the 12 Beyond Budgeting principles to see how they create a more agile, adaptive enterprise

-          Review several organizations that have already eliminated budgets

Going into 2009, HOLT CAT faced a tremendous market downturn as the US plunged into a recession. The company made a key decision to alter its management process into one that immediately made them more agile and adaptive. Gretchen Stepke will share her first-hand experience of why they choose to eliminate budgets and how it changed the focus of management’s attention. She will also share why they continue to operate without budgets even though the economy has rebounded quite strongly.

As the Director of Finance Business Systems, Gretchen can explain how their systems assisted in this transition and where they would like to go.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work at a company with no bosses? In this session, Doug Kirkpatrick will share that experience from his personal point of view. Learn how Morning Star, the largest tomato processing operation in the world, operates with no supervisors, managers or bosses. Even though the company utilizes a seasonal workforce it has extremely high employee retention--including seasonal workers who regularly return year after year.

In this session you will learn what caused Morning Star to take this approach and how it has sustained both employee job satisfaction and company performance.

Specialty Silicone Fabricators was several years into a lean transformation when conventional accounting practices such as annual budgeting and standard costing began to create barriers and be recognized as wasteful processes in their own right.  After learning about Beyond Budgeting, SSF’s President, Kevin Meyer, decided it was time to change.  This session will discuss that change, including short-term and long-term issues that were resolved, and how it fit into a long term lean transformation effort.

With over $50 billion in annual revenues, Kaiser Permanente is the nation’s largest nonprofit health plan with more than 9 million members. Running 37 hospitals and over 600 medical offices, it has operations in 9 states and the District of Columbia. As both an insurer and a provider, Kaiser Permanente has a distinct culture which blends centralized and decentralized decision making.

The effort to deliver the business change and supporting technology capabilities required by the Affordable Care Act provided significant challenges for Kaiser Permanente to prioritize and apportion limited investment funds and drive efficiency into IT operations. Two of Kaiser Permanente’s IT finance leaders will discuss the progress made and barriers encountered on their journey from providing cost transparency to cost knowledge, and how cost knowledge will enable Kaiser Permanente to make informed decisions about the use of technology to drive innovation and improved financial results in the changing health care market place.

Learn why Choosing By Advantages has been called "standard work for decision-making on lean projects." Participants will learn the fundamental rule for making decisions along with the three supporting principles and the five step CBA process.

A very large proportion of complex capital projects fail. They either exceed the budget they were funded at, open after they were supposed to, were scaled back and compromised from what was promised at the outset, or some combination of all three.  So how do you look your Board, your Venture Capitalist, City Mayor  or simply your Boss, in the eye and, without blinking, say “Don’t’ worry, my capital project will be just fine”?  You do it by committing to delivering what was promised and throw away all the processes that don’t align with that commitment. You do it by importing processes from outside, and creating processes from scratch that do align with it.  It’s easy to do when you’re given the autonomy to do it.  This very rarely happens, but it happened at Sutter Health. And it is working. The $320MM Sutter Health Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, California opened under budget and ahead of schedule, and those processes are now being taken to the $2B Sutter Health Van Ness & Geary Campus hospital in San Francisco. I will discuss what changed at Sutter in how we budget, contract, and plan work and how that change connected directly to success.

American education is not broken, it is obsolete. As such, reform is about fixing what is broken and transformation is about creating the future. This session explores how socio-cultural systems thinking can save communities from repeating the same non-solutions to the "education problem" all over again.

Construction remains a deadly industry -- over 700 workers are injured on a jobsite everyday, and 3 are killed.  Despite improved safety technology, outcomes have been stagnant.  Now, companies are beginning to apply lean thinking to improve construction safety.  Having seen dramatic improvements as a result of instituting a Continuous Safety improvement program, The Boldt Company has begun using the routine of a "Kata" to develop a new discipline to improving construction safety.  This session will explore how the application of Kata can be applied to engage the workforce in running small experiments to learn and improve.

Task deconfliction has been the primary concern of management since the industrial age. Management practices and tools, including those applied to projects, focused on deconfliction with little concern for synergy. Work flowed through Ford’s production without interference. In projects, the Critical Path Method assures work was done in sequence without interference. In both cases, deconfliction was chosen over synergy.

The information age creates new opportunities for synergy. This session explores these concepts and offers practical tools to achieve both high deconfliction and high synergy on today’s projects. For those who want to read ahead, these concepts are drawn from “Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age” available online.