One of the tenants of TPS is to learn as much as you can, as quickly as you can, with as much future flexibility as possible. This is the whole point of JIT. The more quickly something can be built or mocked up, the more quickly it can be tried and tested, and the more [...]
Although it caters to the I.T. community, Tech Republic sometimes publishes pieces could have that have a wider application. Here are two of them. In Five ways of thinking that can fell I.T. leaders, author Ilya Bogorad lists some limiting beliefs that can result in the I.T. folks being marginalized in the company. She says: [...]
In a short, but interesting, thread on lean.org, Emma asks an interesting question: “Can an IT system support Lean?” She goes on to point out a general trend she has seen where the “kaizen guys” offer a lot of resistance to the introduction of sophisticated I.T. systems. “Lean” stuff aside, I offer this recent post [...]
I was in a popular “Gold Rush” themed restaurant the other night, and they were struggling with a new table assignment system. In the past the system was very simple. When you arrived, you told them your name, the number in your party. They wrote your name on a list, and gave you a pager. [...]