ABSTRACT
The Shingo Institute has been conducting site visits and administering the Shingo Prize for almost four decades. In 1997, Boston Scientific acquired a 30-acre site in Cork, Ireland, that included a 25,000 square-foot facility featuring a historic protected building, the Munster Institute. Boston Scientific Cork has a rich history in improvement systems that date back to 2001. Starting in 2010, however, the site shifted its focus from the implementation of Lean tools to the development of a culture of continuous improvement. The University of Washington began its Lean journey in 2010 and built a culture based on engaging each one of their 1,400 employees in the F2 Division in the pursuit of daily kaizen. The most important part of an assessment is tone: The tone of the content, the tone of the assessor, and the tone of the assessment itself.
