This is a (belated) response to a post from Patsi Sells on The Whiteboard. She asked about safety and kaizen.
When first implementing some of the tools and mechanics of the TPS (especially in a manufacturing environment), many of the initial efforts seem to run afoul of the industrial safety professionals. My experience suggests a couple [...]
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
I re-read my “What Nukes?” post and realized I was really rambling. I want to reiterate a key point more clearly because I think it is important.
In the “Bad Apple” theory there is an implied assumption that the cause of an accident or other problem was one person who, at that moment in time, was [...]
Warning to Reader: This piece has a lot of free-association flow to it!
Oops. A few weeks ago a story emerged in the press that a B-52 had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana with half-a-dozen nuclear armed missiles under its wing. The aircrew thought they were transporting disarmed missiles. This is a rather major oh-oh [...]
Thursday, October 11, 2007
In Mike Wroblewski’s blog “Got Boondoggle?” he
comments on just how much packaging and dunnage is not visible in Toyota’s Industrial Equipment plant. Of course that is remarkable because of just how common it is to find the opposite condition. Factories (and offices) have lots of packaging around, and spend lots of time dealing with [...]
One of my kaizen-specialists-in-training just came to me asking for help. The Team Members he is working with are not seeing the need to understand sources of work variation.
I hear that a lot, both in companies I have worked in and in the online forums. Everyone seems to think it is a problem in their [...]
On a cloudy morning a few years ago I started my truck, turned on the headlights and noticed one of them was not working. While changing a headlight isn’t that big a deal, I needed a state safety inspection anyway, and I really didn’t want to mess around under the hood.
So I called the auto [...]