On December 1, 2022, Operational Excellence held its second Continuous Improvement Community of Practice (CoP) event, in which John Metras, Interim Vice-President, Operations, spoke to 44 CoP attendees about how Lean Six Sigma training and CoP drive a fundamental shift in how we address Continuous Improvement as an organization and the opportunity to leverage people and skills to address waste and reduce costs.
This quarterly event assembles recent Lean Six Sigma Yellow and Lean Green Belt graduates, gathered to share experience, institutional knowledge, and best practices to align and support our organizational missions.
During the session, we had the opportunity to:
- Hear from Sean Zheng, who was recently promoted to Sub-Head in Stores, Municipal Services within UBC Facilities, on how he improved on-time delivery for custodial stock requests, and how a Lean Six Sigma approach helps him leverage efficiencies.
- Review the 14 principles of Lean and vote for the top three principles participants think UBC should focus on, which are:
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- #1: Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time (54%)
- #2: Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment. (44%)
- #3: Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others. (44%)
- Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation (genchi genbutsu). (34%)
- Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy. (29%)
- Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface. (24%)
Special thanks to Sean and our attendees for sharing their knowledge and experience!
Our next CoP meeting will be held in March 2023. If you wish to join, please reach out to David Pepin, Knowledge Transfer Manager.