Lean Six Sigma for Good Podcast

In this podcast, I share a presentation given by Kjell van Zoen, who was a lean consultant and small business owner, and who now runs the Strategic Energy Management (SEM) program for Energy 350. He explains how there are strong overlaps in SEM and Lean principles, and how he is applying his lean skills to SEM in order to further Energy 350’s mission to “mine energy efficiency as a resource to displace power plants, save businesses money, and protect the environment.”

Since it’s inception in 2005, and According to the Consortium for Energy Efficiency, Strategic Energy Management (SEM) takes a “holistic approach to managing energy use in order to continuously improve energy performance, by achieving persistent energy and cost savings over the long term. It focuses on business practice change from senior management through shop floor staff, affecting organizational culture to reduce energy waste and improve energy intensity. SEM emphasizes equipping and enabling plant management and staff to impact energy consumption through behavioral and operational change.”

Links

* About Kjell van Zoen * Energy 350 SEM program* Energy Trust of Oregon* Lean Portland

Transcript

Kjell: Thanks for coming out today. For those of you who don’t know, this is a Lean Portland happy hour. Lean Portland, our tagline, as you can see here, is “Helping people make work better.” We’re obviously an organization. We don’t make any money whatsoever. What we do is we do pro bono consulting for nonprofits, and it’s based on an organization that Toyota started, helping nonprofits as well. We also put on educational events that we teach Lean workshops, which is for anybody in the community who is interested and then we do these happy hour events. Sometimes the happy hours have a certain topic like today. Today’s is about Lean and energy efficiency.

A quick agenda: Network, have drinks and free beer – you guys

are on that – listen to me ramble for a while, ask some questions maybe, and then,

afterwards, we can network a little more and drink some more free beer. Anybody

have any questions about that?

My name is Kjell von Zoen. I work here as an SEM coach, I’ll talk more about what that means in a minute. I work at Energy 350. I’m also a Lean operation educator. I teach at PSU and then also through Lean Portland and sometimes through the Center for… I’m sorry, I’m totally losing my mind on that one. Sometimes I also teach through PCC CLIMB Center. I’m the education and events lead for Lean Portland as well.

Energy 350, this is the wonderful space you’re in today. This

is Energy 350. We’re a consulting firm and, as you can see here, we mine energy

efficiency as a resource to displace power plants, save businesses money, and

protect the environment. If you want to learn more about Energy 350, you can

ask Mike here or myself or you can go and look at our website.

In this podcast, I share a snippet of a talk from the Master Brewers Association of America Northwest District Spring Meeting. I spoke as part of Lean Portland, along with Matt Horvat and Maria Grzanka.

The full presentation is available on podcast and video.

Links

* EPA Toolkit (reference for slide)* Master Brewers Association of America* Lean Portland

Transcript

Our Lean Portland group was asked to speak at the Master Brewers Association of America, Northwest District spring meeting. This is May 11, 2019. I took a little snippet of my section of the presentation where I talked about the eight wastes and how it ties to environmental impacts. I think I’ve shared that before, but added a couple of different examples to that, so I thought I’d share that. It’s just a couple of minutes long, but I thought you might enjoy. Thanks.

How many of you have seen these wastes before? Some of you? Okay. One thing I thought that was really cool was that these also line up with sustainability efforts and environmental impacts as well. If you have inventory, you need space. That means you need a bigger building and if you’re building something new or expanding, that’s going to require materials. And then you’ve got to heat and maybe cool and light the space and that’s going to cost money and have an environmental impact as well. By cutting down the inventory and letting things move through your facility faster, that will require less actual space. Or you can, as we were talking about, can you modify the process to reduce the time or delay expanding or having to move to a new facility by looking at the route and flow of your work.

Another thing is transportation. If you are having to move and transport things around a lot, that may require packaging material – the plastics and wraps and cardboard boxes and containers and all those things that have a material impact. Someone’s got to make those, and there’s raw materials that are consumed and used up in that. And then you have defects and, obviously, you have to deal with the defects and dispose of it and get rid of it and that can have a cost to it as well. Or it can be sent down the drain and have to be processed and treated so there may be chemicals involved to have to deal with it.

And so when we’re waiting, things can expire and things can go bad and you can have to throw things out and so you order too early. One of the common things we run across is bulk buying and saying, “I can get a really good deal if I buy a lot of this up front.” But then if I don’t have processes that deal with it quickly, it has the risk of going bad. When we look back, we took up a lot of space to store all of this that we got a good deal on, but did we actually get the money’s worth at the end of the day or not when we had to deal with the loss that we had and the extra cost of carrying around and the money that wasn’t in our bank account was tied up ...

In this podcast, I share a webinar that I gave to the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (as a board member of the Sustainable Development Division).

The webinar is titled “Process Improvement Nonprofit Volunteering with Local IISE Chapters”

I share some background on our Lean Portland group, and how it is connected to the local Portland chapter. I also shared some examples of work done in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Atlanta (presented by Greg Smith).

Links

* IISE* IISE Sustainable Development Division* IISE Portland Chapter* Lean Portland* Watch the webinar with slides* Download the slides (PDF)

Transcript

Carol (C):  Thank you

for joining us today for the webcast Process Improvement Nonprofit Volunteering

with Local IISE Chapters presented by the Sustainable Development Division. I’m

Carol LeBlanc and I’m today’s moderator. And now, I’ll turn things over to

today’s presenters, Brion Hurley and Greg Smith.

Brion (B):  Thanks,

Carol. This is Brion calling in from Portland and Greg is on here as well from

Atlanta.

Greg (G):  Hey Brion,

hi everybody.

B:  What I’d like to do

is we wanted to share some activity that different chapters have been doing

around this concept of process improvement nonprofit volunteering and so we’ll talk

through a couple of examples. Tiff is not able to join us today, she’s got some

important stuff going on at work, so I’m going to cover her peace with the

Seattle Puget Sound chapter.

The idea here was to try to share some of the activity that

is happening and then, hopefully, through our successes and some of our

struggles, you’ll have a better idea of how your chapter could, potentially,

reach out to local nonprofits and start to practice your skills and give back

to the community and help them see some of the benefits of the skill set that

we have and also engage your chapter and build some momentum for the people who

are involved and wanting to learn more or practice their skills.

The Sustainable Development Division is a group I’ve been

involved with since I think around 2013. I think it’s been around a little bit

longer than that, just by a year or two. It’s a fairly new division compared to

other divisions, but what our mission is, is to advance the general welfare of

humankind by applying resources and creative abilities of the industrial

engineering profession to the development of sustainable societies. What we

looked at was the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and those are

In this podcast, I share a webinar that I setup with Michel Gelobter, author of “Lean Startups for Social Change“

The webinar is titled “Experimenting Our Way to Meaningful Change”

He discusses the Lean Startup approach, and how it can be used to quickly and efficiently improve social, environmental and community issues (homelessness, climate change, racism, government and nonprofit efficiency, and much more) without wasting time, resources and money.

You can watch a video the entire webinar with slides below

Links

* Lean Startups for Social Change: The Revolutionary Path to Big Impact* Contact information for Michel Gelobter* Email: [email protected]* Website: http://www.leanchange.net/blog/* Twitter: @lean_change * Portland State University Impact Entrepreneurs (Jacen Greene)* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B): Welcome everybody. My name is Brion Hurley. I work with a group called Lean Portland and we are a volunteer group that works with local nonprofits to teach them Lean and Six Sigma principles and concepts. We’ve been working pretty aggressively, I guess, at that for the last couple of years now. I ran across Michel’s book a couple of years back and I thought that would be a good topic for us to share and talk about. I’d also like to introduce Jacen here, with PSU, who’s also helped us get this organized.

Jacen (J): Hi everyone. I’m Jacen Greene, Director of Impact Entrepreneurs in PSU’s School of Business. We’re a set of social innovation and social entrepreneurship programs and events for both students and community members. One of the programs I manage and teach in is our Certificate of Social Innovation. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and community members can take it to design and launch a new social venture – a nonprofit, a social enterprise, a government program. We’ve launched organizations such as the Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation, Next Garden, Construct Foundation, and a whole set of others. I teach Lean Startup methodology and this book is a great resource for our students and we’ll be using this webinar as a recording in our courses as well.

B: I’ll hand it over to Michel and you introduce yourself and then share some of your insights about your book, that would be great.

Michel (M): Thank you and thanks, everybody. Really glad to have a chance to speak with everybody. I am Michel Gelobter, I’m the author of Lean Startups for Social Change. I’ve been involved in social change work since a pretty young age and I have really come to realize, when I went into the for-profit world about the 15 years ago now to do cleantech software startups, I started realizing that I’d been doing startups in the social change world my whole life.

In this podcast, I share a webinar that I setup with Michel Gelobter, author of “Lean Startups for Social Change“

The webinar is titled “Experimenting Our Way to Meaningful Change”

He discusses the Lean Startup approach, and how it can be used to quickly and efficiently improve social, environmental and community issues (homelessness, climate change, racism, government and nonprofit efficiency, and much more) without wasting time, resources and money.

You can watch a video the entire webinar with slides below

Links

* Lean Startups for Social Change: The Revolutionary Path to Big Impact* Contact information for Michel Gelobter* Email: [email protected]* Website: http://www.leanchange.net/blog/* Twitter: @lean_change * Portland State University Impact Entrepreneurs (Jacen Greene)* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B): Welcome everybody. My name is Brion Hurley. I work with a group called Lean Portland and we are a volunteer group that works with local nonprofits to teach them Lean and Six Sigma principles and concepts. We’ve been working pretty aggressively, I guess, at that for the last couple of years now. I ran across Michel’s book a couple of years back and I thought that would be a good topic for us to share and talk about. I’d also like to introduce Jacen here, with PSU, who’s also helped us get this organized.

Jacen (J): Hi everyone. I’m Jacen Greene, Director of Impact Entrepreneurs in PSU’s School of Business. We’re a set of social innovation and social entrepreneurship programs and events for both students and community members. One of the programs I manage and teach in is our Certificate of Social Innovation. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and community members can take it to design and launch a new social venture – a nonprofit, a social enterprise, a government program. We’ve launched organizations such as the Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation, Next Garden, Construct Foundation, and a whole set of others. I teach Lean Startup methodology and this book is a great resource for our students and we’ll be using this webinar as a recording in our courses as well.

B: I’ll hand it over to Michel and you introduce yourself and then share some of your insights about your book, that would be great.

Michel (M): Thank you and thanks, everybody. Really glad to have a chance to speak with everybody. I am Michel Gelobter, I’m the author of Lean Startups for Social Change. I’ve been involved in social change work since a pretty young age and I have really come to realize, when I went into the for-profit world about the 15 years ago now to do cleantech software startups, I started realizing that I’d been doing startups in the social change world my whole life.

In this podcast, I share a webinar that I gave with Matt Horvat of Lean Portland, and Kelly Stevens from The Rebuilding Center.

We were asked to talk about our experiences applying Lean to the building reuse industry, which includes work over the past few years with The Rebuilding Center and Habitat for Humanity Restore (multiple locations).

The slides (PDF) are available for download here.

Links

* Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA)* The Rebuilding Center* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B):  I

wanted to share with you guys a webinar that Matt Horvat and I put together for

BMRA. They are the Building Materials Reuse Association. The Executive

Director, Joe Connell, reached out to us. We had met Joe when he was the Director

over at Portland Restore, which is part of Habitat for Humanity, soon after he

took the BMRA job but really liked what we presented and wanted to share that

with this industry. They’re a nonprofit that promotes the vibrant building

materials economy and that’s part of A World Without Waste. And so really cool

organization that they have going on and they put on conferences and they have

memberships with a lot of people in the reuse or deconstruction industry, so

lines up well with organizations like the Rebuilding Center that we work with

and it worked out the last couple of years.

The presentation we put together was talking about Lean in

the building reuse industry and we had some help with the presentation from the

Rebuilding Center. Cody Stevens was able to support us during the webinar,

which was great, and Chris Larson, who is the process improvement person at the

Rebuilding Center now, he was helping us put together some of the slides and

some of the photos that were there.

So in preparation for this webinar, Matt and I went over to

the Rebuilding Center and got a view of some of the recent updates and they’ve been

really making some changes. If you’re in the Portland area, please check them

out and you’ll notice that they’ve slowly been chipping away at some of the

ascetics on the outside and building some infrastructure in place, so really

cool what they’ve been doing lately. Then Matt also did a gemba walk over at

one of the deconstruction sites in Vancouver, Washington and took some notes

and comments of where he saw some opportunities.

That was what we were trying to convey in the seminar here, so hopefully, you

enjoy it. Check it out, let us know what you think, and thanks for listening.

Joe (J):  This is Joe

Connell, Executive Director for BMRA, as I was just saying before I remembered

to record. We’re hearing from Brion Hurley and Matt Horvat today about Lean principles

for building reuse. I ran reuse centers for 13 years; I know all too well what

it takes and what the struggles are, and I started to say earlier, I wish that

I had known Brion 15 years ago. It would have saved me a lot of agony. We’re hoping today that Brion and Matt

can teach us something about Lean principles and how they relate to our

industry.

One reminder before we go,

In this podcast, I share a webinar that I gave with Matt Horvat of Lean Portland, and Kelly Stevens from The Rebuilding Center.

We were asked to talk about our experiences applying Lean to the building reuse industry, which includes work over the past few years with The Rebuilding Center and Habitat for Humanity Restore (multiple locations).

The slides (PDF) are available for download here.

Links

* Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA)* The Rebuilding Center* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B):  I

wanted to share with you guys a webinar that Matt Horvat and I put together for

BMRA. They are the Building Materials Reuse Association. The Executive

Director, Joe Connell, reached out to us. We had met Joe when he was the Director

over at Portland Restore, which is part of Habitat for Humanity, soon after he

took the BMRA job but really liked what we presented and wanted to share that

with this industry. They’re a nonprofit that promotes the vibrant building

materials economy and that’s part of A World Without Waste. And so really cool

organization that they have going on and they put on conferences and they have

memberships with a lot of people in the reuse or deconstruction industry, so

lines up well with organizations like the Rebuilding Center that we work with

and it worked out the last couple of years.

The presentation we put together was talking about Lean in

the building reuse industry and we had some help with the presentation from the

Rebuilding Center. Cody Stevens was able to support us during the webinar,

which was great, and Chris Larson, who is the process improvement person at the

Rebuilding Center now, he was helping us put together some of the slides and

some of the photos that were there.

So in preparation for this webinar, Matt and I went over to

the Rebuilding Center and got a view of some of the recent updates and they’ve been

really making some changes. If you’re in the Portland area, please check them

out and you’ll notice that they’ve slowly been chipping away at some of the

ascetics on the outside and building some infrastructure in place, so really

cool what they’ve been doing lately. Then Matt also did a gemba walk over at

one of the deconstruction sites in Vancouver, Washington and took some notes

and comments of where he saw some opportunities.

That was what we were trying to convey in the seminar here, so hopefully, you

enjoy it. Check it out, let us know what you think, and thanks for listening.

Joe (J):  This is Joe

Connell, Executive Director for BMRA, as I was just saying before I remembered

to record. We’re hearing from Brion Hurley and Matt Horvat today about Lean principles

for building reuse. I ran reuse centers for 13 years; I know all too well what

it takes and what the struggles are, and I started to say earlier, I wish that

I had known Brion 15 years ago. It would have saved me a lot of agony. We’re hoping today that Brion and Matt

can teach us something about Lean principles and how they relate to our

industry.

One reminder before we go,

In this podcast, I interviewed Jess Schamberger, who is the Vice President of Operations at Goodwill of the Heartland in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Goodwill has a contract manufacturing division that most people don’t know about.

She discusses some of the lean and Six Sigma improvements implemented in the donation receiving area, as well as the light manufacturing services they provide to local businesses like Whirlpool, Collins Aerospace, and Nordstrom Direct.

They facilitated 26 improvement events over the past 3 years, and 17 5S events in the retail backroom area. They were able to reduce floor space, better organize their work areas, reduce time to process donations, improve visual controls, and improve quality, improve customer satisfaction, and save thousands of dollars.

She explains her combined passion around manufacturing and helping develop job skills for those who need assistance.

She also gives tips for working with a nonprofit, what books she recommends, and how to partner with local companies for training and support.

Links

* Goodwill of the Heartland* Heartland Goodwill Enterprises* Jess Schamberger LinkedIn Profile* Iowa Lean Consortium* Lean Enterprise Memory Jogger* Lean Office and Service Simplified* Flow in the Office* Goodwill Success Stories

Transcript

Brion (B):  I’m here with Jess Schamberger; she works at Goodwill in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. What’s the official title of the piece you’re working with? It’s Goodwill of the Heartland?

Jess (J):  It is, Goodwill

of the Heartland and then also Heartland Goodwill Enterprises, which is our

separate corporation for federal contracts.

B:  Could you explain

how that works because I think that’s a piece that a lot of people aren’t

familiar with when they think of Goodwill is the industrial part of that work? that’s how we met, through Rockwell

Collins, as you guys were doing some work with some of our bags and recycling in

our processes, so I think that was really interesting. Can you talk a little

bit about that and also the other activities you guys have going on.

J:  Sure. Most people

are familiar with Goodwill and our retail operations because they’ve been

around for a very long time; since 1902, so we’re an old human service

organization. At the time, our founder,

In this podcast, I interviewed Jess Schamberger, who is the Vice President of Operations at Goodwill of the Heartland in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Goodwill has a contract manufacturing division that most people don’t know about.

She discusses some of the lean and Six Sigma improvements implemented in the donation receiving area, as well as the light manufacturing services they provide to local businesses like Whirlpool, Collins Aerospace, and Nordstrom Direct.

They facilitated 26 improvement events over the past 3 years, and 17 5S events in the retail backroom area. They were able to reduce floor space, better organize their work areas, reduce time to process donations, improve visual controls, and improve quality, improve customer satisfaction, and save thousands of dollars.

She explains her combined passion around manufacturing and helping develop job skills for those who need assistance.

She also gives tips for working with a nonprofit, what books she recommends, and how to partner with local companies for training and support.

Links

* Goodwill of the Heartland* Heartland Goodwill Enterprises* Jess Schamberger LinkedIn Profile* Iowa Lean Consortium* Lean Enterprise Memory Jogger* Lean Office and Service Simplified* Flow in the Office* Goodwill Success Stories

Transcript

Brion (B):  I’m here with Jess Schamberger; she works at Goodwill in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. What’s the official title of the piece you’re working with? It’s Goodwill of the Heartland?

Jess (J):  It is, Goodwill

of the Heartland and then also Heartland Goodwill Enterprises, which is our

separate corporation for federal contracts.

B:  Could you explain

how that works because I think that’s a piece that a lot of people aren’t

familiar with when they think of Goodwill is the industrial part of that work? that’s how we met, through Rockwell

Collins, as you guys were doing some work with some of our bags and recycling in

our processes, so I think that was really interesting. Can you talk a little

bit about that and also the other activities you guys have going on.

J:  Sure. Most people

are familiar with Goodwill and our retail operations because they’ve been

around for a very long time; since 1902, so we’re an old human service

organization. At the time, our founder,

In this podcast, I read an article I wrote for the Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance the recovery, reuse and recycling of building materials.

I share my thoughts on how I hope the reuse industry can follow the path of other industries to embrace the concepts of Lean and Six Sigma, without putting up the typical barriers of “not invented here.”

I also talk about the difference of process efficiency at an individual versus a system level.

I am presenting further on this topic via webinar on March 25, 2019 at 1pm EST. Contact me if you would like an invitation.

Links

* Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA)* Article: “Will Process Improvement Methods from Manufacturing Work With Reuse?”