Category: Articles
Improving Leadership in Lean Business
It’s time for leaders to complement thinking Lean with learning how to behave Lean. Putting the two together will accelerate your Lean transformation and lead to far better results. Because of the difficulties most companies have had achieving any real success with Lean, managers are now beginning to realize there is a leadership dimension specific [...]
The Problem with Creative Work and Creative Management
Article By : Jim Womack Posted By : Kevin Meyer Years ago I heard a presentation from someone at Toyota explaining where to begin in implementing the Toyota Production System. “Start by analyzing the work to be done.” This meant listing all the actions required to create the value in a given product and then [...]
Hirano’s Eight Conditions for Flow Production
Editor’s Note: Congratulations to Mr. Bodek on winning the 2005 Shingo Prize for his book, Kaikaku, The Power and Magic of Lean. More information. I hope you liked my earlier series titled the 10 Commandments of Kaikaku by Hiroyuki Hirano. I am working on his latest book, a difficult but fascinating process for me. At Productivity Inc. [...]
Shingo’s ‘Know Why’ Hands-On Lean
Lean manufacturing is first and foremost a gritty, hands-on factory issue. This is written by a factory guy for other factory people. If you are an executive, a headquarters staff person – for that matter, if you have an MBA or work in accounting at any level – you might just as well skip this [...]
Make Work Cells Work for You
Reprinted with permission, Quality Progress Cellular layout and organization create compact, highly focused work environments that release a host of benefits, quality being among the foremost. Briefly, a work cell is a grouping of manual or machine processes that can produce a complete item or family of items. Cellular work stations are close enough together [...]
RFID – Myth and Reality
Article By : Andrew Herdan Posted By : Kevin Meyer A new acronym is rapidly becoming part of our daily vocabulary in the business world – an acronym for a technology that will have as much, if not more, impact on our lives as the PC or DVD. That acronym is RFID, or Radio [...]
Creating Basic Stability
Lean production has dramatically lifted the competitiveness of many manufacturing companies and the value they deliver to customers. What’s more, encouraging news surfaces almost daily about firms embracing the central tenants of lean and driving them into nonproduction areas of the enterprise such as product development, purchasing, value-chain management, and engineering. Despite these triumphs, many [...]
The Fear of Change
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, thirty-second U.S. President (U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C., March 4, 1933) I first met Dr. Shigeo Shingo in 1982 at a conference in Tokyo at the New Otani Hotel. He gave a marvelous speech and afterwards was sitting in a wheelchair near the [...]
6 Problems with Performance Metrics
How many people inside your organization would say, “We have the best performance measurement system; we learn so much from it!” Or might they say something else? Consider the popular expression, “What you measure is what you get.” As my four-year old son once said, “Is dis true?” It is to some degree, but not [...]
Lean in Higher Education
The time is right for higher education administrators, faculty, and staff to begin applying Lean management to their business. The consequences of not doing so could be fatal. The Center for Lean Business Management, LLC Kensington, Conn. Most U.S. colleges and universities face a never-ending struggle to deliver valuable educational services while at the same [...]
