As part of our mission to help organisations with their lean journeys the Lean Enterprise Academy held its second annual Sharing Day at the National Motorcycle Museum just off the M42 in Solihull on Thursday 3rd April 2014.
Purpose of the Sharing Day
A critical element of any lean implementation is the process of reflection – looking back and thinking about what we have done and capturing the lessons learned so we can improve the way we work in the future. Whilst leading lean companies have formal reflection meetings to identify problems, develop countermeasures and communicate improvements to the rest of the organisation there is often little opportunity to share and learn with people outside the organisation. Therefore we have organised the LEA Community Sharing Day – connecting the lean community of practice together so that we are able to share and learn from likeminded others.
Process for the Sharing Day
The process for the Sharing Day is quite simple. We were looking for organisations to share their lean implementation stories in small groups of approximately 20 people. We allowed 30 minutes per story. Each organisation had 20 minutes to present followed by 10 minutes of questions and discussion. A member of the Lean Enterprise Academy’s faculty and an experienced lean practitioner facilitated the sessions. The opportunity to present gave each storyteller the opportunity to reflect on the dialogue created and to think through potential next steps. The stories could have been A3s (in your organisation’s format), posters, a video clip, photographs or a maximum of 6 PowerPoint slides.
To share a story we invited abstract submissions – a summary of what you wanted to share on the day. These were then reviewed by a panel organised by LEA.
People at the Sharing Day
In addition to the sharing sessions we also top and tailed the day. In the morning Dan Jones spoke about Lean in the Digital Age and in the afternoon the separate groups came together to share reflections and learning from the day.
Each group was chaired and facilitated by LEA faculty and an expert panel, which included Mark Davies and Keith Edwards from Toyota Lean Management Centre and Peter Watkins and David Marriott from GKN.
We would like to thank the various organisations who contributed to the day which include:
- Elastra
- GKN
- GlaxoSmithKline
- Peugeot
- Jæger Toyota
- Network Rail
- Novo Nordisk
- Royal Bank of Scotland
- RR Donnelley
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