Saturday, November 24, 2007
The third element of this organization’s successful drive to eliminate part shortages was a systematic approach to problem solving. They made it a process, managed just like any other process, rather than something people did when they had time. Even though this is “Part 3″ of this series, in reality they put this into [...]
Saturday, November 24, 2007
For kanban to work well, there has to be a solid foundation under it. That foundation is production leveling or heijunka.
Before I get to far into this, though, I would like to point something out: At the mention of leveling, people who are only just learning about kanban will point out all of the good [...]
Thursday, November 15, 2007
One of the displays in the Toyota Museum in Nagoya was an exhibition on “Universal Design.” This exhibition runs through December 2.
Rather than trying to interpret and articulate the concepts, I just want to list some of the key words. I think they stand for themselves, and provide a good baseline for evaluating the design [...]
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Friday was a visit to the Toyota Museum in the morning and the “1 hour tour” of the Tsutsumi assembly plant in the afternoon.
Toyota Museum
If you ever get to Nagoya, the Toyota Museum is superb and definitely worth a visit. Even if you have no interest at all in lean manufacturing (so why are you [...]
“How do I get the leaders involved?” How often have we all heard, or even asked, that question? Of course the actual answer is “you can’t.” At least you can’t force them to. But there are things that might help the leader decide to get involved.
I think the biggest mistake people make is to assume [...]
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
I re-read my “What Nukes?” post and realized I was really rambling. I want to reiterate a key point more clearly because I think it is important.
In the “Bad Apple” theory there is an implied assumption that the cause of an accident or other problem was one person who, at that moment in time, was [...]
I guess four months into this, it kind of makes sense to talk about waste. But rather than repeat what everyone else says, maybe I can contribute to the dialog and toss out some things to think about.
Identifying / Seeing Waste.
Taiichi Ohno had 7 wastes, a few publications say 7+1. I have always disliked trying [...]
Do you have a responsibility to make sourcing decisions on anything other than Quality, Delivery, Cost? This
news item about a mass-fatality industrial fire in China opens up some interesting thoughts about sourcing over here.
For future reference after the link dies, the lead of the story is:
A fire at an illegal shoe factory in eastern [...]
Those of you who are familiar with Shingijutsu’s materials and teaching (or at least familiar with Nakao-san’s version of things) have heard of “The Seven Flows.” As a brief overview for everyone else, the original version, and my interpretations are:
The flow of people.
The flow of information.
The flow of raw materials (incoming materials).
The flow of sub-assemblies [...]
Warning to Reader: This piece has a lot of free-association flow to it!
Oops. A few weeks ago a story emerged in the press that a B-52 had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana with half-a-dozen nuclear armed missiles under its wing. The aircrew thought they were transporting disarmed missiles. This is a rather major oh-oh [...]