RESOURCES
Osterling Consulting is dedicated to helping organizations achieve operational excellence. Explore our resources for practical tools, insights, and strategies to support continuous improvement.
PRODUCTS
Shingo Prize Winner!
Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation
by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling
★★★★⯪ 4.5 on Amazon (776 reviews)
Align your leadership team to deliver the highest possible value to your customers
Too many organizations today suffer from silo-centric behavior and intra-organizational conflict. Yet most don't understand what's holding them back from achieving outstanding performance.
Value Stream Mapping - an essential but under-used methodology - is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than merely a tool to eliminate operational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow.
In this detailed guide, business performance improvement experts Mike Osterling and Karen Martin present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done - in any environment - and how to design improved work systems.
"Despite decades of viewing value stream mapping as the core tool of Lean transformations, there is still confusion. Karen and Mike put mapping in its proper perspective as a methodology for getting high-performing teams to see waste, share a future state vision, and build meaningful actions that are carried out with passion and purpose."
Jeffrey Liker
Author, The Toyota Way
The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service and Technical Environment
by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling
★★★★⯪ 4.4 on Amazon (63 reviews)
The Kaizen Event Planner is a practical, how-to guide for planning and executing Kaizen Events in non-manufacturing settings, and conducting post-event follow-up to sustain the changes made. Geared to continuous improvement professionals and leadership within the office areas of manufacturing, the service sector and knowledge-worker environments, this book provides the methodology and practical tools for generating measurable results, while building a motivated workforce and laying the foundation for continuous improvement.
"Karen Martin and Mike Osterling have captured a succinct genealogy for Lean thinking and combined that with real working tools that will help orchestrate very effective continuous improvement events."
CJ Buck
CEO/President, Buck Knives
Metrics-Based Process Mapping: Identifying and Eliminating Waste in Office and Service Processes
by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling
★★★★⯪ 4.8 on Amazon
Metrics-Based Process Mapping (MBPM) is a tactical-level, visual mapping approach that enables improvement teams to make effective, data-based decisions regarding waste elimination and measure ongoing process performance. The mapping technique, often used to drill down from a value stream map, integrates the functional orientation of traditional swim-lane process maps with time and quality metrics that are essential for designing improved processes.
Building on the success of its popular predecessor, Metrics-Based Process Mapping: An Excel-Based Solution, this updated edition takes readers to the next level in understanding processes and process improvement. Among the improvements to this edition, the book includes:
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Foundational content about processes—what they are and how they vary
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A description of the difference between value-stream and process-level maps
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New content about how to bridge the gap between your current state and your desired future state
"The book is well structured, easy to follow, and immediately applicable. The examples and step by step guidance make it accessible for both beginners and experienced practitioners. Whether you work in operations, IT, healthcare, or professional services, the principles translate seamlessly across industries."
Paul Turlings
LEAN GLOSSERY
From A3 to WIP, this glossary provides a standard understanding of the lean terminology.
LINKS OF INTEREST
Systems 2 Win
A suite of Excel-based lean templates to document your continuous process improvement activities and results.
Mike Osterling joins other podcast guests including industry thought leaders Michael Ballee, Drew Locher, Mark Graban and more! Listen in as Mike addresses the power and challenges of moving kaizen events off the shop floor and into the office.