Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
In this TED Talk, Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School talks about “How to turn a group of strangers into a team.” Although long-standing teams are able to perform, our workplaces today require ad-hoc collaboration between diverse groups. The question is: What kind of leadership, and what kind of structure, contributes to working together …
Imagine a factory with a large monument machine. It takes several days to set up. When it does run, it runs very fast, much faster than you can actually use its output. Therefore, you take the excess output and store it to use later. Actually, you don’t know how many items you need to make, …
An organization’s culture and mindset evolve over time. When confronted with a problem or challenge, the organization (or more accurately, the people in the organization) view it through a filter of their experiences. Ideas that they believe have worked for them under past similar conditions are more likely to be applied again. Ideas that have …
“My computer won’t boot.” Mrs. TheLeanThinker’s computer was hanging on the logo screen, keyboard unresponsive. I know already that if the CPU were bad it wouldn’t get this far. I also knew that the system hasn’t even tried to boot the OS from the hard drive yet, so that likely isn’t the problem. Working hypothesis: …
Continue reading “Learning = Extending the Threshold of Knowledge”
Darren left a great question in the Takt Time-Cycle Time post: Question… Which system is more efficient, a fixed rigid Takt based production line or a flexible One Piece Flow? In terms of designing a manual based production line to meet a theoretical forecasted ‘takt time’, (10 fixed workstations needs 10 operators), how do you …
Continue reading “It’s “What must we learn?” not “What should we do?””
While we lean practitioners seem to have earned a reputation of distain for high-speed automation, industries like mass production consumables, and the food and beverage industry, would not be viable without that approach. These plants are capital intensive, and the main focus of the people is to keep the equipment running. I hinted at some …
As I work in the field, I continue to encounter a desire to get right to optimal results – “Why aren’t we working to eliminate all of the waste?” Once people start seeing opportunities, there is a great temptation to try to simply engineer a new process and implement it. This is especially true in …
Continue reading “Organize, Standardize, Stabilize, Optimize”
On Monday MIT hosted a webinar with Steven Spear on the topic of “Creative Experimentation.” A key theme woven throughout Spear’s work is the world today is orders of magnitude more complex than it was even 10 or 15 years ago. Where, in the past, it was feasible for a single person or small group …
Chapter 4 of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership lays out the picture of a company where continuous improvement of operations is the primary focus of the management system. Note here that I said “focus of the management system” rather than “focus of the managers.” I believe there is a crucial difference which I will …
One of the graphics in Bill Costantino’s presentation really struck me, but my thought was out of context so I wanted to make a separate post about it. It was the concept of the “current knowledge threshold” illustrated here: As I interpret it, the red line depicts the “we know how to do this” area. …