Eric Cecava

The process improvement methodology built for factory floors turns out to be just as useful when the waste you are eliminating affects patient outcomes Lean Six Sigma was developed in manufacturing. Its vocabulary comes from Toyota: value streams, waste, pull systems, standard work. Its statistical rigor comes from Motorola's Six Sigma program, designed to reduce defects in electronic components. It is not language that sounds natural in a clinical environment. Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, who led Lean Six Sigma deployment at Adena Health System in Ohio and applied process improvement principles throughout his work at McLaren Port Huron in Michigan, is more interested in what the methodology produces than in how it sounds. Waste in Healthcare Looks Different Than Waste in Manufacturing In a manufacturing context, waste is visible and physical: inventory sitting in a warehouse, material being reworked, equipment waiting for a part. In healthcare, waste is often embedded i...

How a career in industrial engineering and plant operations turned out to be useful preparation for running a hospital in Michigan Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, did not start in healthcare. He graduated from Purdue University with a degree in industrial engineering, earned an MBA from The Ohio State University, and spent the first part of his career at Delphi Automotive and then Honeywell International, managing lean production systems and supply chain operations for consumer products facilities across the Midwest. Healthcare came later. The path to it, in retrospect, prepared him for it in ways that a more direct route might not have. Starting in Manufacturing Was Not a Detour Industrial engineering is fundamentally about how work flows: where it slows, where it doubles back on itself, where the design of the process creates friction that the people doing the work absorb at personal cost. Cecava learned this at Purdue and then practiced it at Delphi, where he worked as a lean...