An article titled “Sharp Drop in Firefighter Fatalities in 2009” appeared in a safety trade journal recently. For the first time in three years, it said, on-the-job firefighter fatalities dropped below 100.

Capability indexes allow us to characterize the relationship between the process potential and the specifications. Performance indexes characterize the past performance relative to the specifications.

In part one of this series I described what dyslexia is and how I linked “dyslexia” with “lean.” In pa

One of my favorite value-stream walks is with the senior managers of several organizations who share and jointly manage a value-creating process that stretches all the way from raw materials to the end customer.

When so many managers and businesses have access to virtually the same tools and information, it seems peculiar that two similar businesses can operate so differently, one being a success story while the other fails.

In this four-part series, we take an in-depth look at how to design an effective work environment. Part one discusses the elements of continuous-flow work cells.

Evidently Steven Ouellette did not like my June column, “Is the Part in Spec?” The adjectives he used were “complicated,” “unhelpful,” “backward,” “confusing,” “unnecessary,” “crazy,” and “disastrous.”

In this four-part series, we take an in-depth look at how to design an effective work environment. Part one discusses the elements of continuous-flow work cells.

John Berger is no stranger to the benefits of training within industry (TWI). In 1995, when Berger was working for global manufacturing giant Emerson, he was challenged to move an entire product line of electro-mechanical sensors from Minnesota to Singapore.