We were down on the shop floor watching an assembly operation. The takt time was on the order of three hours. The assembler was new to the task, and the team leader periodically came by and asked if he was “doing OK.” The reply was always in the affirmative.
As the takt time wound down to [...]
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 [...]
This post on the Fastcompany.com blog shows a clever desktop manufacturing invention.
But what really got my attention was the development process that starts at 3:40 in the video. It shows the process of developing it. They may not call it “3P” but, by and large, this is what it looks like.
As they develop ideas, they [...]
A couple of days ago I had an interesting session with an improvement team in a fairly large company. They have been working on this for almost 10 years, and believe that while they have made some spot progress, they are clear that they have spent a lot of money but not yet established what [...]
John Shook dives into some of the messy issues of true root cause
in his most recent post.
We touched on a similar issue here
a few months ago. But it is always worth coming back around to people because because in this system (actually in any system) there are always two issues with people.
People are [...]
In most references describing the process of good problem solving, the first real step is to explain what actually is the problem.
It is easy to get tripped up at this stage and describe the problem in terms of the desired target, or in terms of “lack of” a specific countermeasure. That, of course, skips over [...]
The
Lean Enterprise Institute is taking up a “Back to Basics” theme.
But what, exactly, are “the basics” of the Toyota Production System?
This is critically important. Permit me to cite an analogy.
Look at a house. What do you see? What would you say are “the basics?”
At first glance, all houses have walls, a roof. They have [...]
A couple of posts ago, I tried to emphasize “hypothesis testing” as the key, core thinking behind the TPS. For that matter, I think that anyone who truly understands any of the various improvement approaches out there will find the same thinking at the core. Certainly Six Sigma; Theory of Constraints; and TQM are all [...]
Kris Hallan is a frequent contributor on the
LEI forum at lean.org.
In this post, he outlines some great experiences with trying to implement the “A3 process” in his organization.
Lean Forums – A3.
One thing that really drove home what goes wrong most of the time with the A3 process, and frankly, with most well-intentioned efforts [...]
In past posts, I have referred to an organization that implemented a “
morning market” as a way to manage their problem solving efforts.
Synchronicity being what it is:
Brian asked me to fill in some more details with a post on “
The Whiteboard” and
Barb, the driving force in the organization in my original story, wrote to tell [...]