Watch out for drug names that look, sound alike – Yahoo! News One of the most common errors made in the health care industry is medication – giving the wrong stuff to the patient. There are a lot of root causes, and this article highlights one of them. I certainly understand that the commercial pharmaceutical [...]
Steve Fonseca asks an interesting question on The Whiteboard. Are lean companies really transparent with their customers and suppliers as to cost/profits. Is this a lean principle or not, or to what extent? I am going to offer an opinion, then perhaps other readers can chip in. First, there is no real definition of what [...]
My friend Tom poses an interesting question to production managers: “If I ask you to produce different quantities and types of products every day, what quantity of people, materials, machines, and space do you need?” Of course the answer is usually, at best, inarticulate and, at worst, a blank stare. There isn’t any way to [...]
On the surface, a “two bin system” seems a great, simple solution to a part resupply process that could otherwise get complex. And, on the surface, I don’t argue with that. But two-bin has some limitations. And because it is so simple to set up, those limitations are frequently not understood or taken into account. [...]
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 place [...]
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 [...]
The short story of assembly problems is lack of parts. Part shortages drive all kinds of waste, including: juggling the schedule; expediting; bigger lots or batches – and all of these things end up causing shortages later on in a self-reinforcing death spiral. So how did an assembly shop which built about 10 units / [...]
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 [...]