There is an interesting thread developing on the NWLEAN discussion group. Kris Hallan, a regular reader here, asked a great question about the contributions of the industrial engineering pioneers to what, today, we regard as “lean production.”
This, in turn, sparked some debate about whether Taylor, the Glibreths, and others were actually following lean methods; about [...]
Grassroots Innovation: The 3rd Way.
Greg captures a concept in 183 words that entire books have utterly failed to explain.
When we are trying to solve a problem, there are always people involved. And people have positions, feelings, and are always emotionally tied to this-or-that outcome.
It is critically important to find “The 3rd Way” when working on [...]
I will be the first to tell you that this is probably repetition of a fairly narrow theme you have seen here before. But I think of different ways to frame it, or get different thoughts, so I share them.
“Problems first” is one of the mantras used by Phil Jenkinson, the CEO character in
The [...]
We were down on the shop floor watching an assembly operation. The takt time was on the order of three hours. The assembler was new to the task, and the team leader periodically came by and asked if he was “doing OK.” The reply was always in the affirmative.
As the takt time wound down to [...]
This is Part 3 of a multi-part review.
Part 1 is here.
Before I get into it, I will break the rules of blogging and acknowledge a time gap here. I did finish the book shortly after I wrote part 2, in fact, I didn’t want to put it down. So now I am going back [...]
Mark Grabon’s latest post hits the key difference between metrics that help improvement, vs.
management-by-measurement that destroys trust and possibly drives unethical behavior. He quotes a U.K. hospital administrator as saying:
“We’re trying to shift from collecting data for judgment to data for improvement.”
I agree with Mark’s assessment: “Brilliant.”
Metrics are a “Check” in Plan-Do-Check-Act.
The purpose is [...]
One of the things I often hear when we start talking about mistake-proofing and standardizing operations is that we are taking away people’s “creativity.”
“Creativity” in this case is usually the challenge of figuring out how to make a broken process function, or figuring out how to make the product work when, as designed, it doesn’t. [...]
A couple of days ago I had an interesting session with an improvement team in a fairly large company. They have been working on this for almost 10 years, and believe that while they have made some spot progress, they are clear that they have spent a lot of money but not yet established what [...]
John Shook dives into some of the messy issues of true root cause
in his most recent post.
We touched on a similar issue here
a few months ago. But it is always worth coming back around to people because because in this system (actually in any system) there are always two issues with people.
People are [...]
In a
previous post, I talked about Steven Spear’s observation about how a sensei saw a process and the problems. Jeffery Liker, Mike Hoseus and David Meier have done a good job capturing how a sensei teaches and summed it up in a diagram in the book
Toyota Culture. (for those of you following at [...]