Whether in service delivery (including health care delivery), manufacturing, or any other production environment, your team members are likely having to make lots of decisions under perceived time pressure. Even with great visual aids, many of these processes are mistake-prone. One of the reasons I like pre-kitting parts for a specific option configuration is that [...]
My main desktop computer runs Ubuntu Linux. The default email client is called Evolution. A recent upgrade introduced a very cool feature. When I hit “Send” it looks for language in the email that might indicate I meant to include an attachment. If there is no attachment, it pops up this handy reminder: Maybe Microsoft [...]
Tom posed an interesting question on The Whiteboard. Has anybody else noticed that quality is taking a back seat lately due to the tough economic conditions? Things are tough everywhere, but I’m seeing more and more evidence of companies taking short cuts (to cut costs) where the end result is poor quality. I’ll say what [...]
AP IMPACT: Chinese drywall poses potential risks Although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to look like a huge set of customers got burned (once again) by quality problems from China. Before I go any further, I have to say that I have spent loads of time in China. [...]
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 [...]
Each day you are exposed to an unimaginable number of viruses and bacteria. Any one of them has the potential to overwhelm your body and kill you. But your immune system detects the foreign body, responds, swarms the source of infection, defeats it, and learns so that your immunity is actually strengthened in the process. [...]
Microsoft has an internal initiative to start running controlled experiments to determine what is actually better for users. I have no data (as I have no inside scoop from Microsoft, even though they are right down the road), but there is general opinion out there is that one of their latest efforts turned out to [...]
Jim left a great post on The Whiteboard way too long ago. His problems seem to sum up to these statements: Every valve is hand made one by one in batches through several processes. …about a 10% turnover rate…Consequently we are always training new people…the supervisor needs to make sure the worker understands the job [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]