Last week, Marc Onetto came to visit our office at Theodo to share his experience of deploying Lean Thinking at Amazon.com Marc Onetto is the retired SVP Operations and Customer Service of Amazon.com. He discovered Lean at GE, first with Six Sigma training and then coached by Nakaosan from Shingijutsu. He joined Amazon.com in 2006 to improve the operations side of the business. Among the many fascinating topics discussed, I want to share one anecdore on Amazon's adoption of Lean Thinking. Marc did not find it difficult to convince Jeff Bezos to deploy Lean Thinking, as the obsession to create more value for the customer by reducing waste is fully aligned with Amazon's customer obsession. But one thing that was worrying at the time was how Jeff would react to bringing in Japanese consultants to help. Not only was Jeff not fond of consultants in general, these consultants were so rough that they were referred to as "insultants". The good news for Amazon and its customers, is that Jeff Bezos did not mind the insults and on the contrary loved his first kaizen session, leading to widespread deployment of Lean Thinking. And contributing to Amazon further scaling its operations while raising the bar in terms of quality of service for its customers. I wish I had been a fly on the wall during that first kaizen session! #lean #leantech #amazon
Good story ;
It was amazing!!!
Mark is a great leader! You are very lucky to have him visit!
Nice story!
Researcher - Author - Consultant
4dPlease consider using my Time-Based Analysis Framework to transform any organisations value adding capability, it is visually powerful. Analysis of the end-to-end processes prior to action is considered paramount to remove non value adding areas in the organisation that can account for 85% of the product, service or health patient journey. 1. Looking through the lens of time identifies a lot of waste and untapped potential that cannot be seen by financial performance measurement. Attach yourself to a product or service and the average value adding touch time in manufacturing has been found to be less than 15%, even in so-called Lean organisations. In UK local government can be as low as 4%. 2. To transform organisations, combine employees and their process knowledge with my time-based framework to guide development, remove non value adding time and improve supply chain synchronisation. 3. Supply chain synchronisation has also been found to be poor. When replacing ERP/MRP supply chain triggers with pull type control, a 60% reduction in inventory levels is possible. https://www.drbobbarker.co.uk/forum/forum/time-based-analysis-animation Your employees are your best consultants, time based analysis is the framework.