Episode 73 - The War on Waste Paradox - Chapter 17 - Part 1 - Audio Book

A Consortium of Problem Solvers Podcast of Len Bertain's Audio Books

In this chapter, we find Chris is freaking out because his turf is being encroached upon. He is obviously protecting his special Tribal Knowledge and is resentful that any one would think that he could do anything wrong. As Jim points out, his information is not only wrong but it costs the manufacturing operation time and therefore the company a lot of money.

We have observed over and over that those in staff positions with their Tribal Knowledge integrated into the value-added process are very often fair game for big wastes. And in most cases, that information is exposed as waste but maybe not as dramatic as in the situation at Quality Pump. As we usually do the process map, we expose many of the staff function Tribal Knowledge steps on the map. As we work through the line positions where value-added operations are done, Tribal Knowledge gets into the details of how a job is done. So we don’t have much success exposing wastes there until we dig into them with project teams.