My "How to Get Started" series has been going on for several months.  Eventually, you get to the point where it's not starting your worried about...it's "What do we do next?"   (I might have gotten a bit over into this part of the lean implementation in the first series.)  So, we need to start looking at what you need to do now that you have all the basics in place.

In the previous series, our activities were those that you could just do.  You can just schedule and do the leadership planning.  You can just do 5S or Quick Change or a VSM.  Granted, you might not do them well or you might not followup so that you continue to do them effectively.  You might not deploy them beyond the first workshop.  But you can say you did them.  (In fact, that's what I think lots of companies have in mind when they say they're doing lean...they did one or more of these activities some time in the past.  In their view, they're now doing lean.)

In this series, we'll be talking about activities that take time, study, work, and discipline.  You can't just do them any more than you can just get a college degree.  You earn it through several years of hard work.  Same with the methods we'll talk about in this series.

What will we be covering in this series?

Here's the list:

• Standard Work and Training
• Preventive Maintenance
• Pull Systems
• Work Balancing