I was in a newly opened store of a large big-box outdoor sports store, and saw an item on display that I had already decided to buy this summer. The displayed price was actually a bit less than what I had been encountering online, so I went ahead. Unfortunately the one “in stock” on the [...]
If you are in a production operation, be it a factory or even administration, take a look in your scrap bins (or trash cans). What you find there can be very informative. Is all scrap treated the same? In a lot of metal working operations, I see routine drop scrap mixed in with scrapped parts [...]
Vance left a really good comment on the recent Travel Tales post. He said, in part: Having worked in the airline business, it’s really a matter of having employees that CARE (most due to their own pride, not by management) We many times had weather and mis-connected passengers to deal with. It only took a [...]
Carlos Villela’s blog lixo.org has a great story about simple solutions. I really have no idea if it is true or not – indeed, a couple of the details don’t hang together. On the other hand, I have seen for myself the kind of thinking that is described in this story. Link to full story: [...]
Note – this post was written pretty much simultaneously with a post on the lean.org forum. Mike Rother has put up a compelling presentation that highlights a long-standing misunderstanding about the purpose of “standards.” Some time ago, a (well-meaning) author or consultant constructed a graphic that shows the PDCA wheel rolling up the incline of [...]
This article on NPR is chiefly about the dilemma that hospital administrators are facing as escalating government reporting requirements are being tied to their Medicare payments. (For my non-US readers, Medicare is the U.S. government medical insurance program for seniors and retirees. It pays a huge portion of hospital’s revenue, and thus, its policies carry [...]
PC posted a really interesting bit of visual control history in the forums. Click on the link to read his whole post, there is a second part about lack of visual controls. In a recently aired episode of Showdown: Air Combat the host, a USAF fighter jock, asked about a series of colored stripes painted on [...]
Travel plans sometimes come together at the last minute. I went to the green company’s web site to rent a car, and got a message saying the site was down for maintenance. It said to please call the 800 number if I wanted to make a reservation. I called the number. The nice person on [...]
Boeing’s “PTQ” (Put Together Quickly) videos show a time lapse of an airliner in production. They have been producing the for years – certainly since I was working there. This one, though, shows something a little special. When I first started working there, the idea of a line stop was unthinkable. The plane moved on [...]
In many processes, we ask people to notice things. Often we do this implicitly by blaming people when something is missed. This is easy to do in hindsight, and easy to do when we are investigating and knowing what to look for. But in the real world, a lot of important information gets lost in [...]