Things not specifically about lean manufacturing.
On Monday MIT hosted a webinar with Steven Spear on the topic of “Creative Experimentation.” A key theme woven throughout Spear’s work is the world today is orders of magnitude more complex than it was even 10 or 15 years ago. Where, in the past, it was feasible for a single person or small group [...]
Zoe owns Grassroots Books in Reno, NV and is exploring how to make these concepts work in a small retail operation. They are just getting started, but are finding lots of opportunities. When talking to her last night, she mentioned she would like to network with other people who are trying to apply these concepts [...]
One of the tenants of TPS is to learn as much as you can, as quickly as you can, with as much future flexibility as possible. This is the whole point of JIT. The more quickly something can be built or mocked up, the more quickly it can be tried and tested, and the more [...]
An old, very esoteric, post got a four word comment today that sent my mind thinking. And because the topic is esoteric, this post is as well – my apologies. The post, Is the MRP Algorithm Fatally Flawed, gets a lot of search hits because of the title. The post discusses an obscure PhD dissertation that asserts that the [...]
I am in Germany, with a rental car, going places I have never been. To make this a little easier, I got a GPS unit. One of the features of the GPS is that the voice turn-by-turn can be set in multiple languages. I (reasonably) set it to “American English.” I have got to say [...]
The idea of a continuous improvement culture, a problem solving culture, a kaizen culture, has been with us for decades. Ultimately it is what everyone says they want to create. Yet creating that culture remains elusive for all but a few. I have noticed that, generally, when people describe the culture they are trying to [...]
I have come to expect very little from most airlines, especially for the parts of the “service” that doesn’t involve actually sitting in the airplane. Still, some airlines make their policies more clear than others. Alaska Air, for example, is explicitly clear that I can hold a reservation for 24 hours and cancel with no [...]
Toyota to end Calif. joint venture with GM – Yahoo! News. The joint venture was developed to have American workers learn Toyota’s production methods, which were much leaner and more efficient. [emphasis added] Maybe that was GM’s intention – to “fix” the workforce. This fits in with the judgment I developed about GM’s leadership over [...]
Toyota says it may shut Fremont’s NUMMI auto plant – San Jose Mercury News Part of the aftermath of GM’s implosion is that Toyota is left holding the bag on the NUMMI joint venture. The plant primarily built vehicles for GM (the Pontiac Vibe), but was essentially managed by Toyota as a Toyota operation. A [...]
I am going to break my self-imposed rule against further comment on the automotive industry in general, even though it is more commentary about current events than it has to do with the Toyota Production System. In physics, a black hole is a singularity – a point where time and space are collapsed to a [...]