In my review of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother, I suggested that the staff-level practitioners who are embedded in almost every company that is “implementing lean” could put those practices to work immediately, even if it was not an ideal “top down” teaching process. This week I gave that a try. I was coaching a [...]
This week I am coaching a kaizen team in the first phases of implementing a process to respond to problems on the shop floor. They clearly understand the objective, and are working hard. The key is to keep them focused on working out the problem response process vs. getting distracted by the production problems they [...]
A great key point comes out on page 124 of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother. …a Toyota person once told me to focus on the biggest problem. However, when I tried to do this I noticed a negative effect: We got lost in hunting for and discussing what was the biggest problem. When we tried [...]
Today was traveling on behest of a large corporation, so the travel arrangements were made through them. It all went about as routinely as could be expected on the last weekend before Christmas… for me. Unfortunately the guy I am supposed to meet here had flights going through D.C. that were on a collision trajectory [...]
There is an interesting thread developing on the NWLEAN discussion group. Kris Hallan, a regular reader here, asked a great question about the contributions of the industrial engineering pioneers to what, today, we regard as “lean production.” This, in turn, sparked some debate about whether Taylor, the Glibreths, and others were actually following lean methods; [...]
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 [...]
“Sustaining the gains” is a frequent topic of discussion in the continuous improvement world. Often the discussion degenerates into a rant about “management commitment.” But in the real world, people generally don’t sabotage improvements on purpose. (Though I have seen it happen, but only once.) The mechanism is far more subtle. Before we get into [...]
I was cleaning out some old stuff and came across a folded piece of paper with notes on it. They were from my parting comments to a kaizen event team that had put in a great week with spectacular results. They had started out wanting to improve the delivery of WIP to and from the [...]
This is Part 3 of a multi-part review. Part 1 is here. Before I get into it, I will break the rules of blogging and acknowledge a time gap here. I did finish the book shortly after I wrote part 2, in fact, I didn’t want to put it down. So now I am going [...]
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 [...]