Up to this point I have resisted weighing in on the Toyota quality story largely because:
I don’t have anymore insight than anyone else.
The signal-to-noise ratio in the story seems really low, and I didn’t feel I would contribute much.
But there is another story in the back channels of the “lean” community.
Many of us (myself included) [...]
While the dentist was looking over my x-rays, he saw something he would like checked out by a specialist. He used words like “sometimes they..” and “might be…” when describing the issue he saw.
I get a referral. The information on the referral slip is the name of the referring dentist (which I can’t read), no [...]
“We are a job shop.”
“We never do the same thing twice.”
These are common truths spoken by people who are struggling with how to apply lean production principles to their operation. They want to do better, but don’t see how something that originated in the relentless repetition of an automobile assembly line can work for them.
This [...]
In the
last post I commented on Ron Popeil’s product development approach – to make the product easy to demonstrate drives making it easy to use, which creates more value for the customer.
Let’s take the same thinking back to your internal customers.
What if, rather than just writing a procedure, you had to go and demonstrate [...]
I am in the process of going through a lot of old files and filling up recycle bins. Most of this stuff was collected back in first half of the 1990’s when the world wide web was just gaining critical mass, and a half day on Alta Vista, or the brand new search engine, Google, [...]
Many pundits out there think the economy has hit bottom. If the last couple of cycles are any indication, when things start picking up again, it is going to happen fast. As people scramble to retain or gain market share they are going to want more and want it now.
And, if the last couple of [...]
John Shook’s latest column on lean.org is titled “Was NUMMI a Success?” He adds some interesting thought to the mix of the ongoing post-mortem on GM and NUMMI.
John argues (successfully, I think) that Toyota’s objectives for NUMMI were to learn how to take their system outside of the safe cocoon of Toyota City in Japan; [...]
This is Part 2 of a multi-part review.
Part 1 is here.
In my
review of Kaizen Express back in May, I took
LEI to task for two things – First, I didn’t feel Kaizen Express contributed anything really new to the body of knowledge. I would have been satisfied if it had more clearly explained [...]
A couple of days ago, in “
The First Steps of The Lean Journey,” I said that there really is no first step, only the next step from where ever you are right now.
I admit that I left out a big assumption there – that you know where you are trying to go.
More specifically, that you [...]
Yesterday’s post on vendor managed inventory touched on a couple of things about “lean” and reducing inventory that I’d like to explore further.
All too often “inventory reduction” has been a way to “sell” a lean manufacturing implementation. The reduction of inventory becomes the objective. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is all to [...]