Cultural Background

• Administration

• Health Care

• Program Delivery

• 5 S + 2

Chugachmiut’s employees are committed to a mission of serving its “Customers”: the tribes of the Chugach region and their members. We provide a variety of services ranging from Health Care, Dental Care, Behavioral Health and Substance Abuse, Head Start, Language & Culture curriculum and training, Fatherhood and Families and Healthy Relationships, among many others. Our goal is to maximize the amount of “Value” we provide to our customers. And we have a specific method for maximizing value that we refer to as Chugachmiut’s Lean Initiatives.

In May of 2004, Chugachmiut’s Executive Director was made aware of the management philosophy used by Toyota, commonly referred to as the Toyota Production System (TPS). James Womack and Daniel Jones coined the phrase “Lean Thinking” in their influential book published in 1996 titled “Lean Thinking”. We quickly decided that we wanted to change the Chugachmiut culture to implement Lean, and not just use the Lean tools for improvement.

We began our implementation in the summer of 2004 with a Kaizen in our Port Graham Health Clinic. Although we were complete novices, we did find great value in the communication that occurred around our “Value Stream Mapping” (VSM), and we were able to make some modest improvements. However, our efforts really started bearing fruit when we brought in a Lean “Sensei”, Dr. Tom Jackson of TaktX, based out of Portland, Oregon, to train and guide our staff.In our administrative operations, we use the philosophy and tools of “Lean Administration”. Lean management focuses on creating value for customers through the relentless pursuit of perfection in its processes by the elimination of “Waste”. We discovered that most of our processes were incredibly inefficient, with no training for staff about how to navigate the processes or instruction on how to do the “Standard Work” required for creating value for our customer.

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