Two months ago my column “Are Quality Methodologies All Smoke and Mirrors? Part One” was a review of my interview in 1988 with F. James Mc Donald, the CEO of General Motors Corp. at that time. ... [Read More]
In Miguel de Cervantes' The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, Don Quixote dreams of being a brave knight who rides a great steed to fight for what is right. That dream turned into a ... [Read More]
World War III has begun. This time it’s not a war of battleships, bullets and bombs—this is an economic war. The weapons are televisions, steel, cars, and clothes. This is a war where we have ... [Read More]
I often get assignments at organizations where I am required to take aside a group of people, either within the building facility or off campus, to focus on issues or problems. Typically these ... [Read More]
During the 1980s using flowcharts was the “in thing” to do. Today, technology has provided us with a much more effective and useful tool: simulation modeling. If a picture is worth a thousand ... [Read More]
I’m often asked, “Of all the stakeholders, which one is the most important? Which one is the most valuable resource that the organization must be sure is satisfied?” Let’s look at who the stakeholders are.
• Investors
• Management
• Employees
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Employees’ families
• Community
• Special interest groups ... [Read More]
As I’m writing this column, the U.S. government is debating the approval of a trillion-dollar-plus stimulation package, the Dow Jones average has dipped into the 7,000 range, hundreds of thousands of people were laid off work last week, and poor-performing companies throughout the United States are looking to the government to take money from the well-managed companies so they can continue to ... [Read More]
There’s so much information in the world today that letting people recreate their own databases is a luxury we can’t afford. If we were all allowed to create our own basic concepts without any standardization, we couldn’t effectively interact with each other. Imagine trying to communicate if each person spoke a unique language, or how hard it would be to pay a bill if every individual ... [Read More]
I believe that most manufacturers have mistakenly focused on initial quality and reducing cost and cycle time during the production and delivery cycle. This has come at the expense of reliability.
Customers buy for the following reasons, listed by top priority:
• Features
• Cost
• Availability
• Quality
Customers come back based on:
• ... [Read More]
Last month we reviewed how Ford Motor Co.’s lean concepts were slowly phased out of the organization. The concepts, however, weren’t lost: Toyota realized their potential and improved upon them.
Toyota’s chief of production, Taiichi Ohno, embraced Ford’s concepts wholeheartedly. He applied them to machining operations and then to other areas of production. As a result, the Toyota ... [Read More]
