Lean Six Sigma for Good Podcast

In this first podcast renamed as “Lean Six Sigma for Good” (formerly called “Earth Consultants”), I explain the change in podcast title and purpose.

In the audio, I share a presentation I gave at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, IN in early December, to share my experiences apply Lean and Six Sigma to nonprofits and at my past employers.

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Below is the video from the presentation.

Later that day, we observed the campus mail room, to look for opportunities, and heard about ReThink Wabash, a local nonprofit looking for help with improvement projects.

Links

* Dr. Diane Evans (LinkedIn)* Food Waste project summary video

* Lean Six Sigma for Good (free book)* Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) – Engineering Management Department* LeanSixSigmaForGood.com (new home for podcast content)

Transcript

Dr. Diane Evans (DE):  So anyway,

thank you for coming. So I brought a great speaker. I met Brion I think like

two or three years ago. I was doing a presentation at a Six Sigma conference

and the presentation was project I had done with St. Pat’s K-8 school. St.

Pat’s is a private school and we were trying to add food share or food rescue

tables there. So that’s when if a kid finishes his lunch and has an extra milk

or banana or an orange, something he hasn’t touched, he can leave it at the

table and then another student that wants it can pick it up. So it helps to

reduce some of the hunger, maybe, that some of the children are experiencing in

the afternoon or when they go home.

But the true

reason we wanted to do this was to get it in the public schools. The public

schools wouldn’t let us do this because they were worried about the risk of

what if they set out on a piece of food, another student ate it and got sick,

In this podcast, I share the audio from an interview I did with Lynn McCullough and Joe Wojniak (pronounced why-knock). Lynn runs the TRU Hospice Thrift Shop in Boulder, Colorado.

TRU Thrift Shop sells donated household items and clothes to raise money to provide hospice care services for those in need.

Joe is her brother, and he volunteered to help them improve the workflow, reduce waste hauling charges, and increase revenues with Lean and Six Sigma methods.

I also discuss the future of this podcast, and how I will be changing the name in the future, but still focusing a lot of attention on environmental improvements.

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Links

* TRU Hospice Thrift Shop* Donation Guide* TRU Community Care* Lynn McCullough (email)* Joe Wojniak (blog)* Lean Six Sigma for the Environment (free online course)* WASTE Walks online course (free with coupon code)* Earth Belt Certification* LeanSixSigmaForGood.com (future podcast title)

Transcript

Brion:  Today,

I’ve got a couple of guests with me, Lynn McCullough and Joe Wojniak. They’ve

done some great work applying Lean and Six Sigma methods to nonprofit. Lynn, do

you want to introduce yourself and talk about TRU Community Care and the work

you’ve done at the thrift shop you’ve got going there?

Lynn:  Yes. I’m the

thrift shop manager. We opened our thrift shop in 2005 to be a fundraiser for

the programs of TRU Community Care. Our organization provides or end-of-life

care to those in our community, whether they have the ability to pay or not. We

opened the store to receive donations and try to raise some money, and we’ve

been working towards that end ever since.

Brion:  And where in

Colorado are you guys located?

Lynn:  We’re in

Boulder.

Brion:  Boulder,

excellent. And Joe?

In this podcast, I share the audio from a presentation I gave to the Deconstruction and Reuse Conference in Pittsburgh, PA on October 29, 2019. The conference was setup by the Build Reuse (formerly Building Material Reuse Association). I was invited to speak based on my work with reuse organizations like ReStore and The Rebuilding Center. I also presented a Lean overview webinar with them for Lean Portland.

In this presentation, I give recommendations to organizations on how to engage their staff and volunteers in process improvement, using the following techniques:

* Daily huddles* Andon* Teach 8 wastes (overview) * Go to gemba* Improvement time* PDCA* Coaching* Standard work* Check sheets* 2 second improvements

You can watch the video below to see the slides that accompany the presentation.

Links

* Build Reuse* BMRA Webinar on Lean Principles

Transcript

Brion (B):  Welcome,

everyone. Thanks for coming. How many of you have heard about Lean methodology?

Okay, good. What I want to talk to you about is a system that’s based on that,

those principles, and how that can be used to engage your staff, your workers,

your volunteers in coming up with ideas where they can start to implement some

ideas instead of it being put on the supervisors or managers for being

responsible. I’m going to walk through a little system and see what elements of

this already exists in your organization, and maybe which ones you can maybe consider

adding or enhancing the way in which you do it. I’ve got a couple of videos to

show as well.

I’m Brion Hurley. I run a consulting business in Portland

Oregon called Business Performance Improvement. I also have a group that I work

with in Portland, that’s called Lean Portland, and our group is a volunteer

organization of practitioners like myself. I spent 18 years in aerospace, and

most of that time was just learning and understanding these concepts and tools on

what large corporations are doing around improvement work. But as I started

going further in my career, I started realizing that these concepts work for a lot

of things; not just big companies looking to save money. They actually work as

well for environmental problems and social issues, and so that got me really

interested in sustainability and nonprofit work. There was a group in Portland

just kind of getting started where we were trying to teach these concepts to

nonprofits who maybe can’t afford their own consulting or training. So I’ll

talk to you about my work with Rebuilding Center – many of you have heard about

them – Habitat restored a couple of locations in Portland. Another group is

called Free Geek and they actually refurbish electronic equipment...

In this podcast, I share the audio from a presentation I gave to the Portland Business Alliance (our local Chamber of Commerce). They have a Sustainability Roundtable each quarter, and I was asked to talk about my application of Lean to sustainability efforts.

You can watch the video below to see the slides that accompany the video.

Links

* Recycling Advocates – Bring Your Own Cup Campaign* TIM WOODS – 8 Forms of Waste * How to Make a Papa John’s Pizza (not included in video)* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B):  I worked

eighteen years in aerospace manufacturing. That’s where I got on all my

background in process improvement. We were a supplier to Boeing. Boeing got a

lot of training and education from a lot of the experts from Toyota Japanese consultants

back probably 20-30 years ago and so that kind of all trickled down to

suppliers of Boeing and other businesses. For the last couple decades, these

methodologies around Lean and Six Sigma were gaining popularity, and especially

in larger corporations. How many of you have some familiarity with the

concepts, or have taken classes? A few of you? Okay. So I’ll go through just a

little bit of background on those and show how I’ve seen that there is a strong

connection between these techniques and sustainability efforts, and then just a

couple of examples of some of the work I’ve done in the past and then,

hopefully, open up for questions. I also have a little exercise you can go

through and try to identify waste and inefficiencies in the process, so hopefully,

it’ll somewhat much fun, not just be talking the whole time.

I’m also the president of Recycling Advocates, which is a nonprofit here in town. It’s been around about 30 years. They’ve been involved in a lot of efforts around the Bottle Bill and recycling infrastructure, the master recycler program, and things like that, so putting my foot into the non-profit world a little bit as well. Not only just supporting them with some of these efforts, but also trying to figure out how to run a non-profit. That’s been a very interesting challenge the last two years.

About my organization, like I said, I was in aerospace for a

long time and I had an idea of wanting to go and do consulting on my own,

especially as I started noticing that sustainability efforts can be improved

with some of these techniques, maybe a little bit of tweaking and there, but

it’s kind of a ripe opportunity. I look at sustainability from the triple

bottom line approach of people, planet, and profit. There’s a group in town

called Lean Portland that I also work with.

In this podcast, I share the audio from a presentation I created about a Six Sigma project I setup and facilitated a few years back. The project helped improve the recycling program at the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium.

You can watch the video below to see additional photos and information that does not come through in audio only.

Links

* Reducing trash going to the landfill at a college football stadium (2012)* Kinnick Stadium recycling needs a boost (2009)

Transcript

I’d like to talk about a project I did back in 2011/2012 time frame. I moved back to Iowa City, where I grew up, and started taking sustainability classes at the University of Iowa. That was the third time I’d, basically, enrolled there. I was an undergrad and I also went to grad school there. After a few years, came back and was really getting more into sustainability. Going back to a football game, I realized that there some opportunity there and so I decided to launch a project to try and move the stadium forward a little bit on their recycling program. I’m calling this the Kinnick Stadium Football Landfill Reduction Project.

The idea was to see if I could enhance how recycling was done at the stadium. Growing up in Iowa City, part of the criteria for those in athletics was we had to go clean the stadium on Sunday mornings after every home game and so I got firsthand knowledge in high school about what was going on and then, as a player at the University of Iowa, it was completely out of my purview because I wasn’t at the games, but in the games. But then going back as a fan later and my sustainability hat – or my goggles were on I guess – I noticed that there were some opportunities there. Probably in 2009 is when I first started to pay attention and then, by about 2011, when I started enrolling in classes and getting more connected with the university in the environmental and sustainability programs, then I felt confident to try to launch that initiative. Because I didn’t really know how to get started, so those connections were really important.

What I was able to determine was that, in 2011, there was a

study that they estimated about 25% of the amount of trash that was generated

was being recycled and the university has a goal of getting to 60% diversion by

2020. That was my problem statement that I was able to uncover and, basically,

through the 2012 spring and through the 2012 football season in the fall, I was

able to help with an initiative to try and change how the recycling was done

and make it a little bit better. And then, in 2013, the program was carried on

through the UI staff and fraternity, which I’ll go into a little bit later.

The first thing I want to talk about is this idea of a

project. My background is in Six Sigma and a lot of people don’t know what that

is. Those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s basically a data-driven approach to

solve problems. It’s a methodical way, basically, to take a problem statement,

like I’ve shared, and go through these key steps and have the right approa...

In this podcast, I share the audio from a presentation I created about a Six Sigma project I setup and facilitated a few years back. The project helped improve the recycling program at the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium.

You can watch the video below to see additional photos and information that does not come through in audio only.

Links

* Reducing trash going to the landfill at a college football stadium (2012)* Kinnick Stadium recycling needs a boost (2009)

Transcript

I’d like to talk about a project I did back in 2011/2012 time frame. I moved back to Iowa City, where I grew up, and started taking sustainability classes at the University of Iowa. That was the third time I’d, basically, enrolled there. I was an undergrad and I also went to grad school there. After a few years, came back and was really getting more into sustainability. Going back to a football game, I realized that there some opportunity there and so I decided to launch a project to try and move the stadium forward a little bit on their recycling program. I’m calling this the Kinnick Stadium Football Landfill Reduction Project.

The idea was to see if I could enhance how recycling was done at the stadium. Growing up in Iowa City, part of the criteria for those in athletics was we had to go clean the stadium on Sunday mornings after every home game and so I got firsthand knowledge in high school about what was going on and then, as a player at the University of Iowa, it was completely out of my purview because I wasn’t at the games, but in the games. But then going back as a fan later and my sustainability hat – or my goggles were on I guess – I noticed that there were some opportunities there. Probably in 2009 is when I first started to pay attention and then, by about 2011, when I started enrolling in classes and getting more connected with the university in the environmental and sustainability programs, then I felt confident to try to launch that initiative. Because I didn’t really know how to get started, so those connections were really important.

What I was able to determine was that, in 2011, there was a

study that they estimated about 25% of the amount of trash that was generated

was being recycled and the university has a goal of getting to 60% diversion by

2020. That was my problem statement that I was able to uncover and, basically,

through the 2012 spring and through the 2012 football season in the fall, I was

able to help with an initiative to try and change how the recycling was done

and make it a little bit better. And then, in 2013, the program was carried on

through the UI staff and fraternity, which I’ll go into a little bit later.

The first thing I want to talk about is this idea of a

project. My background is in Six Sigma and a lot of people don’t know what that

is. Those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s basically a data-driven approach to

solve problems. It’s a methodical way, basically, to take a problem statement,

like I’ve shared, and go through these key steps and have the right approa...

In this podcast, I gave this presentation at the AME Annual Conference in Dallas in October 2016 called “Integrating Sustainability Into Your Lean Six Sigma Program Initiative”

I discuss adding green into improvement initiatives, how to communicate sustainability to existing improvement personnel, how existing tools can be modified to consider environmental impacts, how organizations and resources available to help with the integration, and I was hoping to motivate the attendees to continue with process improvements and try to incorporate “green” and the environment in those efforts.

Transcript

Joe Rizzo (J): Please help me welcome Brion.

Brion (B): I’ve got some handouts to give. It looks like we’ve

got enough – about fifty or so. If you want to take a look at some of the key

slides that I’ll be going over, plus a couple of handouts that I mention. If

you don’t get a copy, just let me know and I can email it to you as well.

Thanks for coming. I wanted to start off just getting

familiar with you guys’s background and where your company’s at, so I can get a

raise of hands on the questions that pertain to you. The first one is do you

have a sustainability department or do you know somebody in your organization

that has the responsibility to work on sustainability? does anyone have a program? A couple of you, okay. How about

do you have your ES&H group or a facilities group in your improvement

events and do you invite them to those? Okay, good. Does your ES&H facility

group have their own process improvement events? Half of you, okay. All right.

Have you had any dedicated projects or events around energy reduction, trash,

water, or toxins, typically, focused on that? Okay, good. Do you know how much

you’re spending on electricity, solid waste, water? do you know about what the cost is at your facility? Okay, that’s

good. Some other groups I’ve talked to, very few hands go up on a lot of these

questions, so that tells me just a little bit.

What we’re going to talk through today is how does your Lean Six

Sigma, how can it help with environmental sustainability. We’ll do a little bit

of education, a little bit of experiences that I’ve had at my company, and then

at the end here, we’ll wrap up with some resources and open up for questions.

Most of you are probably familiar or have seen this diagram

before about sustainability, but sometimes there’s confusion about what

sustainability is. It is how we maintain things in the long run, but from a

business standpoint, we want to look at how can the company survive in the long

run. Whether it’s seven generations into the future or whether it’s 1500 years

into the future, it’s really trying to get companies to look at those long term

views of their company and how can they do business that’s going to keep them

around for a long time and so to look at the three areas and not only just make

decisions about profit but look at how does it impact people and how does it

impact the plant and how do we make decisions that try and incorporate all the

ideas and impacts of those into our decision-making.

I’m going to spend a lot of the time talking about the environmental

part or the planet side of this, but there’s a whole other aspect around people

and social.

In this podcast, I share a presentation I gave at the 2019 IISE Annual Conference in Orlando, FL on May 19, 2019.

For the past 3 years, Lean and Six Sigma practitioners in Portland (Oregon) have been volunteering with local nonprofits to teach and mentor them on process improvement. The focus has been on environmental reuse nonprofits primarily. The effort gained traction due to beach cleanup volunteer project started by the IISE Sustainable Development Division at the 2013 Annual Conference in Puerto Rico. I share best practices and key findings about applying Lean and Six Sigma principles with nonprofits.

I also provided an update on a new book called “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 1),” along with a plan developed by Royal Roads University (Victoria, BC, Canada) to expand the volunteer effort across the US and internationally.

You can learn more about nonprofit volunteering, personal benefits for volunteering, and learn how they can get involved with or setup local volunteering efforts in their city.

Links

* Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 1) * IISE Sustainable Development Division* IISE Annual Conference* LeanSixSigmaForGood.com* LeanPortland.com

Transcript

In this podcast, I share a presentation I gave in Orlando a

couple of weeks ago for the IISE annual conference. It was a presentation on

how to expand Lean and Six Sigma in nonprofit volunteering around the world, but

I primarily focused on the United States. I share a project that I worked with

some students from Royal Roads University. I asked them to help me put together

a plan and they came up with some great ideas for help and connected me with

students, volunteers for the nonprofit, and he nonprofit themselves. The audio

from that presentation is available, but the video is also available through

the website, leansixsigmaenvironment.org, or also

at leansixsigmaforgood.com. Thanks.

Brion (B): 

… how do you align everybody up to get the nonprofits on the board at

the right time with the volunteers that want to be there. It’s been difficult

coordination but we know they want the help and we know we have volunteers. I

have like 40 on our list that want to help, but it’s all a coordination

activity, so it’s there.

The turnover in the nonprofits is way higher than I imagined

and that’s really disrupted a lot of activity where you have a lot of start and

stop. Then just trying to match up people’s schedule with when the nonpro...

In this podcast, I share an update on my recent work to apply Lean and Six Sigma techniques to reduce environmental impacts.

I discuss the following topics:

* Monthly Coaching Calls* Green Banana Paper (Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia)* IISE Annual Conference* Volunteer Service Project* Excellence in Sustainable Development Award* Clothing nonprofit work

Links

* IISE Sustainable Development Division* Habitat for Humanity Osceola* Rise Against Hunger* UN Sustainable Development Goals* LeanSixSigmaForGood.com* Washington County Green Business Leaders* My Instagram account @brionhurley

Transcript

Hi, everybody. This is Brion. Every month or so, I put on a coaching call. If you’re interested in getting on the invite for that, send me an email through the website at leansixsigmaenvironment.org and I can add you to the list. Basically, the idea is to just be available and answer questions for people who are looking to apply their skills to an environmental issue or maybe they already have a good background on the environment and they want a little bit more education and support on Lean and Six Sigma, either one, that’s what that is intended for.

I encourage you to join. It’s free, there’s no cost to

it. I just want to reach out and support people who have expressed interest in

the past. Some of the people have downloaded things from my website, some

people have gone through the free online course. If you haven’t check that out,

you can go to the website and find that as well and that will give you a good

introduction to some of the basic tools and the concepts. The important thing,

though, is to practice, and so I really encourage you to find an opportunity to

work in your community, in your work, somewhere where you can try to practice

some of these concepts.

I thought I would just give you an update on where I’m at.

Today is Friday, May 24.

In this podcast, I share an interview I had with Erica Stanulis, who runs the consulting firm called Follow the Sun. She has a strong background in Lean and Six Sigma and sustainability, and we met a the 1% for the Planet Global Summit in Portland in April, and realized we had a similar background and interests.

She talks about her background in the automotive industry, her life changing trip across the world, how she incorporates the sun into her consulting, and her work with the homeless in the Bay Area. I think you’ll enjoy this discussion!

Links

* Erica Stanulis on LinkedIn* Follow the Sun* 1% for the Planet* Homelessness in Portland report (May 2019)* Stephen Reichard* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B):  This

is Erica Stanulis. She has a consulting firm called Follow the Sun. We met at 1%

for the Planet back in early April in Portland. My consulting firm joined 1%

for the Planet a year or two ago and there was an annual meeting in Portland,

so that’s where we first connected. Was that your first conference you went to

for them?

Erica (E):  It is, Brion.

Actually, it was great to meet you and your mom there, actually. I met your mom

first, actually.

B:  That’s right. She’s

my wing woman for networking.

E:  She caught my eye

because she had Business Performance Improvement, I think those were the words

on her name tag, so I was like, “I’ve got to talk to her.” It was my

first global summit with 1%. I’ve been keeping track of them for a while now. Previous

to starting my own consulting practice, I was a director of CSR, corporate

social responsibility, I Go Pro, so we had been in conversations with them when

I was in that role. It was really good, though, to be in a community of

like-minded individuals and connect with people that are already very geared

and wired towards understanding the triple bottom line of people, performance,

and planet, so it was great to meet there.

B:  Cool. You noticed

the business name, so what is your improvement background that caught your

attention?

E:  With respect to my background,

you mean?

B:  Yeah, more of on

the Lean or Six Sigma or both? can

you just go through some of that background?

E:  I did my undergrad

in chemical engineering and came out of school working in the automotive

industry,