Appell

Katrina Appell is a learner, researcher, and lean coach with experience in product development and healthcare. She has been a lean coach at the University of Michigan Health System and a senior lean consultant at Optiprise specializing in lean product development.

Katrina has a PhD and MSE in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a B.S. in General Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The non-academic description of her PhD research is: There is no best way: Every situation is different, so the approach needed is different and needs to fit the organization while supporting the objective. This research used contingency theory to analyze how lean principles were used in complex environments through product development case studies.

Katrina is President of the Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering Alumni and Advisory Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is running an experiment to organize and share her thinking by blogging at appell.org.

Posts by Katrina Appell

Lean Thinking On Purpose

Katrina Appell reflects on a provocative op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times from earlier this year and asks some big questions of lean thinkers. Are we sharing what we know about lean in a way that's accessible? As a lean community, in what ways are contributing to society?

Cost Reduction, Waste, and Purpose

"Eliminating waste makes it easier to see and find problems, which is the first step to solving them, " writes Katrina Appell. "It removes frustrations, which improves worker and customer satisfaction."