Wednesday, October 3, 2007
One very good idea-creation tool is “inverting the problem” - developing ideas on how to cause the effect you are trying to prevent. This is a common approach for developing mistake-proofing, but I just saw a great use of the idea for general teaching.
Ask “How could we make this operation take as long as possible?” [...]
I was in a popular “Gold Rush” themed restaurant the other night, and they were struggling with a new table assignment system.
In the past the system was very simple. When you arrived, you told them your name, the number in your party. They wrote your name on a list, and gave you a pager. They [...]
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The other day I wrote about the situations where I felt a 5 day kaizen event was actually useful. I want to add one more.. sort of. Actually I want to elaborate on “education.”
Sometimes in the early stages of an implementation, there are influential people who need to be won over. Now for those who [...]
Monday, September 24, 2007
To many people, 5 day “kaizen events” are the way to implement lean manufacturing, and the way to improves processes. There is another, larger, group which insists that “events” are only one method, but in actual practice, kaizen events are all they do.
At the risk of being branded a
heretic I propose there are two, [...]
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
We were at a business meeting and my coworker was waiting impatiently for his laptop computer to finish booting up. He and I were sitting next to each other, had identical machines, but I was already working. He made some comment about my machine booting faster for some reason.
But that wasn’t the case.
Here is his [...]
One of my kaizen-specialists-in-training just came to me asking for help. The Team Members he is working with are not seeing the need to understand sources of work variation.
I hear that a lot, both in companies I have worked in and in the online forums. Everyone seems to think it is a problem in their [...]
I just finished responding to a post on
lean.org where the poster was struggling a bit to justify moving two sequential operations together vs. the proposed simple solution of adding conveyance from one to the other. I thought it would be worth a bit to think that through.
In a previous post
“Sticky or Slick”, I [...]