The weather looks great for this weekend, so my wife Amy and I will ‘slip the surly bonds of earth’ in a small private airplane for a summer holiday visit with family a few hundred miles to our south. And though we will arrive at the same destination, at the same time, in the same aircraft, if you ask each of us about our trip you will find we’ve taken two very different journeys to get there.
A final blog in a series of Lean articles includes specific integration improvement concepts that can be applied to the 8 traditional wastes.
introduced the premise of applying Lean to integration. This was followed by Observations of Lean, Where Do You Get Your Ideas?, which was a light piece about brainstorming for process improvement ideas.
Now for some specific examples for integration wastes and opportunities for improvement.
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The world of information technology (IT) is full of acronyms: EDI, EAI, ETL, B2B, B2C, and MFT, just to name a few. MFT, or managed file transfer, is increasingly becoming more important to companies and gaining the spotlight as companies understand the value of reliable data and how it correlates to increasing revenue and profit. Providing a secure and reliable means to move data internally within your company and externally to your customers, suppliers, vendors, and business partners should be an extremely important part of your company's overall IT plan.
Several blogs ago I wrote about Lean and eliminating waste in Good...the Enemy of Best! How Can Lean Be Applied To Data Integration? This article outlined the lean concept, 8 forms of waste, and how the concept might apply to business and data integration for our organizations.
In eliminating waste we improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our organizations, but how do we identify waste or process improvement opportunities? A recent trip to Europe with my wife and kids provided some interesting insights on ways to identify Lean Integration opportunities.
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We've all seen it. John knows the ins/outs of a particular process. John boasts his knowledge, skills of that process, John knows it all, John is the man. Everyone goes to John, "John is out today? He’s the only one that can help us, we have a deadline. Did he leave notes on what we should do? He knew this was due today". "What am I supposed to tell the customer? How do I respond to the customer?"
John is part of a team of eight, a well skilled and knowledgeable team of eight. Each member of the team brings something different to the table but John, he knows everything, and he’s the “go to guy”.
