Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
I have known Russ Field since working with him on a few projects in a large Seattle (now Chicago) based aerospace company. Recently he posted a very (typically Russ) thorough reply on NWLEAN to a question about value stream accounting. I asked him to take the same basic material, clean it up a little, and …
Continue reading “Get Your Ducks In A Row For Lean Accounting”
Mark Grabon’s latest post hits the key difference between metrics that help improvement, vs. management-by-measurement that destroys trust and possibly drives unethical behavior. He quotes a U.K. hospital administrator as saying: “We’re trying to shift from collecting data for judgment to data for improvement.” I agree with Mark’s assessment: “Brilliant.” Metrics are a “Check” in …
Gipsie Ranney is a consultant with The Deming Cooperative. A white paper she recently wrote, contrasting NUMMI with The Big Three, has been circulating by email. I requested, and received, her permission to publish it here. Remembering NUMMI Gipsie B. Ranney January, 2009 The discussions of a bailout for the U.S. owned auto industry – …
In a “management by metrics” world, problems are detected when performance indicators are off track. Perhaps inventory is too high, first pass quality is a problem. Maybe operational availability is tanking. Once the problems are abstracted into numbers, the numbers become the problem. The solution, then, is usually a directive to reverse the trend, to …