As we ramp up into the fall outage season, our core focus is execution in the Field. By keeping our focus in the Field, I am confident we will deliver excellence for our customers and employees, and we will deliver our core promise of All Home Safe 100%.

Many of you have participated in Lean kaizens and workouts (they are different). I thank the many of you who have done that, as it is an intense, time consuming event. I also hope that you came away energized by the experience, and that you see the improvements bear fruit this Fall.

We are purposefully not planning any kaizens or workouts over the next couple of months to keep our focus on execution in the Field. As we execute, I am confident all of us will identify opportunities for continuous improvement. Maybe it’s a process or procedure that is too time consuming. Maybe it’s a new tool that would help performance. Maybe it's simply a small change that helps us execute safer, better.

With that in mind, Lisset Lopez, our Lean Director, in collaboration with One Field Services Lean reps, and in partnership with Rafael Alcala, our User Experience Designer, have designed a Continuous Improvement (“CI”) Form with a simple goal – capture those ideas you have. From there the Lean Team will work with our leaders to evaluate and prioritize the ideas for future kaizens.

Below is a little more detail on the process. I look forward to seeing your ideas for improvement.

“Lean is not the flavor of the day. This is the tone from the top that I not only intend to set through words, but hopefully, also reinforce through the way I manage and the way I act, day in and day out.”

Those were the words of Larry Culp back in 2019 as he talked about strengthening the business by conducting it with a Lean mindset.

Lean is about maximizing value while minimizing waste. It helps individuals identify inefficiencies and apply efforts toward continuous improvements, leading to the delivery of better value to customers. It’s important that everybody within the organization is engaged in continuous improvement (“CI”), which is why a team of lean leaders have developed a workflow process accessible to all employees, to better initiate, plan, execute, and track CI activities.

We recognize that everyone’s lean journey is different, so maybe you haven’t yet been involved in a kaizen project or CI effort yet. Therefore, we’ve built the new workflow with that in mind. Your initial action is simply to enter an opportunity and provide some background, so that it becomes visible. Help is contained within the workflow prompts and work instructions slides as well as from your Lean Leaders.

Below is the diagram for quick reference of the process steps at each stage (Request, Planning, Execution, Newspaper (action plan).

- Jake