Russ Jordan on Driving Personal Investment from Your Team

This week, lean consultant Russ Jordan brings 37 years of executive level operations management experience and 13 years of consulting to the Lean Frontline podcast and shares his thoughts on the critical component of process improvement, key metrics of Gemba Walks, and how investing 15 minutes every morning can lead to personal investment from every team member on the work floor.

Russ Jordan is the owner and principal consultant for LEAN Enterprise Solutions, a consultancy focused on enhancing the business performance of manufacturing firms through the application of LEAN tools, development of manufacturing management teams, manufacturing strategy development and deployment. He supports his clientele with management, communications, and implementation practices and processes providing a roadmap for their success, while retaining their focus on the day-to-day issues. He specializes in process industry operations management, with specific strengths in process improvement, best practice identification and implementation, and organizational and personnel development.

In this week’s podcast, Russ uses his multi-industry experience to break down the key component of process improvement. Even when analyzing two wildly different industries such as pharmaceutical clean room and fish processing, there is no fundamental difference when it comes to processes. “There’s unit steps that have to be measured both for quantity and size and time and speed. That is the bigger issue. I think it is the culture of the organization.”

Throughout the Lean Frontline podcast, culture has proven itself as a recurring common theme in successful lean transformations. Gemba Walks are a key tool that helps identify these areas of opportunity and contribute to a lean culture. Equally important to this tool is understanding how the results fit in. “I like to make sure that every organization has an established dashboard of performance metrics, safety, quality, productivity and so forth, so that they carry a routine basis to understand where they are relative to where they were.”

And this is where employees can really engage their employees. Russ believes that every company should “invest 15 minutes every morning in a stand up where all the managers of the company, managers and supervisors, somebody who represents every department within the organization, comes to an area that is reasonably quiet but hopefully invisible to all the employees in the company.” Those 15 minutes helps build a routine that aligns all the workers with current issues and resolutions, acknowledges their role and function, and empowers them to innovate.

Learn about how lean experts are innovating during COVID-19 in the Lean Frontline podcast.