I recently received a DM asking what 180 OPEX actually does. We fix process compliance problems. So what's a process compliance problem? That's when habits, convenience, distraction or disinterest at any level derail success because your team isn't in full alignment with your process. Now, there are really 3 ways to be out of alignment with the process: 1) Complacency - We don't follow the process because we don't think it's important (or it's inconvenient and nobody cares

Lean is irrelevant to your operation right now. Not because it doesn't work. But because if you keep having the same problems, which is where most of industry lives, you have a control problem. And Lean doesn't fix control problems. It hides them. Here's what a control problem looks like: An operator puts the wrong date/label/product/lid/quantity on the wrong box/pallet/product, and now you're scrapping, reworking, or apologizing your way out of another disaster. This happe

Most organizations don't have a training system or an accountability system. They have training events and they have punishment events. And, statistically speaking, neither training nor punishment events are very effective. Here's how punishment events work in practice: Wait for disaster. Trace it back to where a standard wasn't followed. Punish to deter recurrence. Nobody was checking that standard before the disaster which is why it happened in the first place. The system o