Stewart Anderson
The 5 Whys is a well-known root cause analysis technique that originated at Toyota and has been adopted by many other organizations that have implemented lean manufacturing principles. Unlike more...
Jim Benson
I love to cook. When I make good food and share it with others, they will take a bite and look as excited to eat it as I was to create it. They might not understand the subtleties that went into it,...
Taran March @ Quality Digest
We are here, and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. —H. L. Mencken
I ran across the term “moonshine shop” while reading about a kaizen blitz at Ontario-based...
Harish Jose
I have written about sample size calculations many times before. One of the most common questions a statistician is asked is, “How many samples do I need—is a sample size of 30 appropriate?” The...
Russell Fedun
Cogeco’s technical distribution center in Burlington, Ontario, is one of Canada’s drop-off points for internet modem and cable device repair. In 2011, the company’s management carried out a kaizen...
Ryan E. Day
Business partnerships are nothing new. Partnerships that result in leaner manufacturing processes, more consistent quality, and lower manufacturing costs—that is worth talking about.
With global...
Jim Benson
Let’s take a second to emphasize who is important in the following quotes, all by W. Edwards Deming: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” “A bad...
Bruce Hamilton
Many years ago, the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) introduced a visual measurement device to my factory, referred to as a “production activity log” (PAL), also known to some as an...
Bruce Hamilton
Three years ago I wrote an article titled “The Emperor’s New Huddle Boards,” in which I expressed concern about the trappings of improvement without actual improvement. Since then, my concern about...
Bruce Hamilton
Last month I joined Eric Buhrens, CEO at Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), to host a leadership team from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center. They were on a study mission to many of Boston’s fine...
Grant Nadell
Boeing is demanding its suppliers reduce their prices by 10 percent, according to a February 2018 article published in Bloomberg Businessweek. It’s a hard pill for many to swallow, given...
Mark Rosenthal
A couple of weeks ago I posed the question, “Are you overproducing improvements?” and compared a typical improvement “blitz” with a large monument machine that produces in large batches.
I’d like...
Harish Jose
I have been writing about kaizen a lot recently. It is a simple idea: change for the better. Generally, kaizen stands for small incremental improvements. Here I’m going to look at what is the best...
Willie L. Carter
Becoming a process-focused organization requires a sustained effort, and for most industrial and service organizations that is a difficult task. Failure to improve the performance of your processes...
Kevin Meyer
One of my great pleasures is going for a walk on the six-mile-long and generally empty beach a couple blocks from my house. There’s the remnant of a long-dormant (hopefully!) volcano at one end that...
Mark Rosenthal
Imagine a factory with a large monument machine. It takes several days to set up. When it does run, it runs very fast, much faster than you can actually use its output. Therefore, you take the excess...
Gwendolyn Galsworth
The six core questions you see below are a window to help us understand why we struggle at work. Why? Because the answers to them are missing! The remedy is to first notice that—to notice the...
Bonnie Stone
Dramatic cost savings. Lead time and inventory reductions. Improved transactional processes. Although lean has its roots in manufacturing, nearly every industry and type of organization around the...
Benjamin Kessler
The rise of the independent worker is arguably the biggest change to hit the global labor market in decades. Well more than 30 percent of the United States workforce reportedly lack “real jobs”...
Debashis Sarkar
The cheating at Kobe Steel shook not just Japan but the entire manufacturing world. As Kobe Steel CEO Hiroya Kawasaki revealed, about 500 companies had received its falsely certified products,...
