Bryan Zeigler has a great post on his “ Lean is Good” blog site. Titled “ Andon Calls and Muri,” he describes Toyota’s phenomenal capacity for responding to problems, and then takes us back to where the rest of us are with some really great questions: If it is physically impossible to answer every andon call [...]
If I had a category for “What are they thinking?” I would probably tag this post with it. Patient has an eye exam that is covered by her health insurance. The doctor’s office bills the insurance company. The insurance company disallows $29.32 in charges because they are above a contractual amount. The insurance company sends [...]
Fellow blogger Mark Grabon recently posted “ 10 Things I Wish Lean Practitioners Wouldn’t Say in 2010” on his leanblog.org. I like it enough that my thoughts won’t fit in an appropriate comment on his blog, so I’ll write them here. Go back and read his post first, though, or you won’t make sense of [...]
“We are a job shop.” “We never do the same thing twice.” These are common truths spoken by people who are struggling with how to apply lean production principles to their operation. They want to do better, but don’t see how something that originated in the relentless repetition of an automobile assembly line can work [...]
In the last post I commented on Ron Popeil’s product development approach – to make the product easy to demonstrate drives making it easy to use, which creates more value for the customer. Let’s take the same thinking back to your internal customers. What if, rather than just writing a procedure, you had to go [...]
I am reading Malcom Gladwell’s somewhat new book What the Dog Saw. It is an anthology of articles he has written for New Yorker magazine over the last few years. The first chapter is about Ron Popeil, the icon of infomercials and “Set it… and Forget it.” Gladwell describes a fascinating product development slant – make the product easy [...]