Industry Connect

Going lean: In manufacturing and healthcare (and kitchen pantries)

When Patricia McDonald, vice president of human resources and director of talent, transformation and diversity at Intel, recently visited Oregon State University to tout the benefits of engineering careers at the tech giant, she took time out of her busy day to talk about lean manufacturing.

Patricia McDonald

In the process, she described her nearly overnight conversion from skeptic to full-blown lean crusader. In fact, McDonald admits that her enthusiasm has led her to apply lean concepts to many parts of her professional and personal life.

The core idea behind the lean approach is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste, and although it is often associated with manufacturing, it can be applied to almost anything.

“In the beginning, I was quite a skeptic, because I’d been leading large organizations and delivering results of 10 to 15 percent improvement year-over- year across the metrics of safety, quality, output, and cost — all key indicators for manufacturing. I felt good about that, as did my organization,” said McDonald, who first worked at Intel as a summer intern while studying chemical engineering at Oregon State, and then went on serve as plant manager of the company’s Fab 20 and several subsequent positions. “So I was like: ‘Why is my general manager saying I should go learn about lean manufacturing from a consultant group in Detroit, Michigan? What are they going to teach me? And aren’t they having a lot of their own business struggles and challenges there in Detroit?’ ”

But McDonald went to Detroit, sat through the lean training, and learned enough to implement some lean concepts back in Oregon – sort of.

“I really viewed it as applying only to the factory floor, having the technicians in my organization work on optimizing their work flows and work areas,” she said. “So I did kind of a light touch with a big campaign.”

It wasn’t until she visited the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle that she witnessed the full potential of implementing the lean approach. At the time, Virginia Mason was receiving an award for organizations that had applied lean methodology and demonstrated business results.

“I listened to their acceptance speech and was still kind of skeptical. But they offered a tour, so I jumped on that to see if they had really proliferated this across their practices,” she said. What she saw on that tour proved to be her lean epiphany.

The tour took her to pediatrics where they had facilitated “no wait” for patients. “No wait? Who has no wait in pediatrics?” she said, still incredulous. She visited sports medicine, and saw how they had improved recovery time for rotator-cuff surgery by a whopping 40 to 60 percent, while maintaining equivalent or better quality. The success stories during the tour went on and on, and McDonald kept asking questions, trying to test and see if it was the real deal or not.

It was.

“I was just stunned,” she said. “I remember leaving the building that day. It was cold and blustery, mid-September, and the wind was blowing into my face, and I looked up the street and said to myself, ‘I have totally missed this as a leader.’ I was just so humbled, because they’d had the courage to apply the methodology of lean manufacturing in healthcare, and here I was kind of timidly applying it to my manufacturing organization.”

Needless to say, she returned to Intel and got busy, bringing together a team to apply lean concepts to their biggest challenges as an organization.

“We demonstrated that lean manufacturing practices could be applied to our big engineering problems and our most significant challenges — not just the optimization projects or the projects off to our side, but our core work,” she said. In one example, where it had traditionally taken three weeks to detect a signal when there was an issue, they applied lean concepts and reduced that wait time to 15 minutes.

“You map the process, define what and where the waste is, and then you get experts together and figure out that you can eliminate the waste and develop a standard operating procedure,” she said. “You then implement that procedure, with very tight observation and ways to measure if you’re successful or not, and you learn and continuously improve that procedure. Any result brings an opportunity to learn.”

Her experience with implementing lean concepts at Intel so far is that she and her teams consistently see a 40 to 60 percent improvement across the board, instead of the 10 to 15 percent of her pre-lean days.

“I’m still waiting for when that won’t be the case,” she said. “I always challenge my teams: ‘Okay, I know this is going to be the time we won’t get that level of improvement.’ But so far, we have.”

Over the years, she has applied lean concepts in her various other positions at Intel, not just in manufacturing and product development, but also in developing Intel’s Healthcare Marketplace Collaborative, a partnership among Portland health care providers, a health plan, and the Virginia Mason Institute. Over a three-year period, McDonald was able to show across-the-board patient satisfaction of 90 to 95 percent among Intel employees and demonstrate a 20 to 30 percent cost reduction, with care procedures and quality remaining equivalent or better.

In her current position, McDonald is applying the lean approach to human resources and recruiting at Intel, as well as to the Women at Intel Network, Intel’s largest opt-in employee group.

And, as mentioned, she has applied lean methodologies in her personal life, too. “You should see my pantry,” she says with a laugh. She believes that the lean approach boils down to a new way of thinking, and every organization should consider it.

“I think the true point of lean is that it makes you think differently, and I believe that’s where you unleash human potential that wants to be creative and will deliver the breakthroughs,” she said.

If companies and organizations haven’t investigated lean because they believe that it doesn’t apply to them or that they’re too small, McDonald suggests they “just start.”

“Start small and on areas that are completely within your control, so you can do quick learning and application checking,” she said. “Start with small pilots, and then once you get confidence in your pilots and you’re able to demonstrate a small set of results, you can typically engage others.”

And she added: “You can engage the skeptics!” Obviously, she is living proof of that statement.

— Gregg Kleiner