Lean companies, for the most part, don't use work orders to control production. Why not? Because work orders are wasteful. It takes a lot of time and effort to run the work-order process, and it is 100-percent waste.

My main objective is to encourage greater use of statistical techniques in the service sector and present new ways to implement them.

This is the last in my series making the case that the various improvement approaches are all pretty much the same.

How can governments increase efficiency, prevent errors, and improve customer service? Answer: ISO 9001.

Not every process or problem will produce diagnostic data that we can use statistical or other mathematical tools to address. Sometimes we feel ill-equipped when we have a problem for which our neat and sophisticated tools won’t apply. What should we do?

Recently, a reader of the Lean Self blog made an interesting remark, which is the headline you see above. It actually made me wonder: How happy are we if our to-do list is empty? And how full must it be for us to become unhappy?