One of the things I love about Lean is the philosophy to make things more visual.
This weekend our household dental floss ran out unexpectedly due to the classic white plastic container. My wife commented that you can never know when you will run out of it.
We replaced it with Oral B Dental Floss because the plastic is clear and you can see how much you have left (the attached photo shows how easy it is to see). From looking at their website, they still use plastic you can’t see through on one of their products but the rest are clear. We found the clear plastic to be value added.
My 2009 Hansei: Scarcity inspires creativity and innovation. How can I help harness that inspiration?
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For those reading via RSS feed, I originally had the floss as Glide and not the correct Oral B. I have updated to reflect that.
When I learned about lean, I actually ended up increasing my inventory of household items like this: I now have a 1-bin kanban system for dental floss, in that, when I open up a new dental floss container, I put it on the grocery list right then, and similarly with several other items. I like that a lot better than trying to find a refill point for a partially full dental floss container.
I wish the same could be done with travel sized shaving cream cans. I never know when they’ll run out.
Maybe I need to just count how many shaves I get out of a normal can.