#209 The Toyota Production System - Part 2 w/ Donal

I got an Operational Excellence Green Belt at Amazon.com, and participated in a Kaizen later on. Also they tried implementing an Andon Cord for complaints about items in Customer Service. I think they managed to keep expert roles around but as Donal says, you can't have the TPS without the TPS.

https://youtu.be/F5vtCRFRAK0?feature=shared This video ends by listing a few other places that have tried to use TPS. I'm particularly interested in the hospital example, as a hospital is a much more dynamic and uncertain environment than an assembly line. You don't know up-front what medicine or people with particular skills you're going to need when a patient comes in the door (or even have a good idea or what kind of patient you're dealing with), which specialist doctors are going to be off sick, and if the hospital's beds are full you have to do a lot of ad-hoc on-the-spot things like boarding and perhaps getting other people out the door faster, etc. I know this strays into "technical details" but it would feel more relevant if you could cover an example more like that, if the hospital example Bloomberg lists is legit. I think an example like that is also better to explore sudden changes to what you have to deal with, e.g. a massive pileup on a motorway which then floods the hospital with patients, an outbreak of a disease within the hospital, or a global pandemic. Edit: oh I forgot to mention, the example feels particularly salient to me as a hospital, or set of connected hospitals, feels closer to managing society as a whole than anything else I can think of on that scale.