Hal Macomber and Joe Ely have decided to blog about Everyday Lean Examples.They have each made their first post in a series that will last through July. In his post titled Everyday Lean — “Jugban”, Joe describes how he leaned out his contact lens cleaning process:

“I wear gas-permeable contact lenses. Though the parents who watch me umpire youth baseball have serious doubts about it, my vision is pretty good with these lenses. To do this, though, I have to keep my lenses clean and that means using distilled water to rinse the lenses each morning. Several years ago, I noted that I kept running out of the water and forgetting to buy more. Or I’d stock up and have to keep all these gallon jugs sitting around.

“Boom. It hit me. I had an inventory problem. And we solve inventory problems with pull systems…”

Hal writes about traffic lights at on-ramps in Pace Arrivals to Increase Throughput:

“Traffic lights are popping up at on-ramps on the busiest highways to pace cars merging with on-going traffic. Studies have shown that smoothing the arrival of vehicles during rush hours has eliminated collisions and maintained traffic speed at higher levels.

“How could pacing arrivals work in the project setting…”

Make sure to read the comments as readers have supplied even more examples of Lean thinking in everyday life.Thanks to Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Business Blog for leading me to these posts.

Joe’s second post: Everyday Lean—“Just-in-time” information

Hal’s second post: My Swiss 5S Kitchen Experiment

Joe’s third post: Everyday Lean — Right-sizing tools

Joe’s fourth post: Everyday Lean-Visual Data Charting