Lean Retailing

Posted on December 28, 2005  Comments (0)

Lean Manufacturing Needs Lean Retailers by Bill Waddell:

Stuck in their outdated business model, with a simple minded economic model, they all scour the globe looking for a supplier they can wring a few cents out of on the purchase price, then send the product in staggering quantities through the most bloated and wasteful supply chains.
…
The hope for lean in retailing comes from the building products sector, where Home Depot and Lowes are doing battle. You don’t read much about whiz bang technology driving Home Depot distribution centers because they didn’t waste their money on such things. They have a few DC’s for imported stuff, but the rule for doing business with Home Depot is that manufacturers generally ship directly to stores in box and skid quantities. Most of the purchasing is done regionally, rather than from headquarters. A Home Depot store manager has an 800 number for each supplier that he feels quite free to use any time, any day, to replenish whatever is needed in any quantity needed.

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America’s Manufacturing Future

Posted on December 27, 2005  Comments (0)

A Wake-up Call From Asia by Patricia Panchak:

China and India very aggressively are pursuing advanced manufacturing. Increasingly, China’s exports to the U.S. are composed of advanced-technology products.
…
J.P. Morgan said it would add 4,500 employees in India by the year 2007, mainly by setting up operations in Bangalore to support its growing structured finance and derivatives businesses globally. Such jobs are not the simple, low-value call-center work that up to now we’ve associated with this developing economy. And J.P. Morgan isn’t alone; UBS and Goldman Sachs earlier made similar announcements.

From my previous post, Relative Engineering Economic Positions:

The hope some retained that the United States would retain the highest end work and others would work on the less complex work is not what the future holds. The future will prove to be an international marketplace where the United States is a significant but not dominant player. That future can still be bright but it requires a different vision than one in which American dominance is taken as a given.

The challenges to USA manufacturing will continue. The best hope, as I see it, for retaining manufacturing leadership in the USA is through increasing the adoption of management improvement methods including lean manufacturing.
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Selecting Six Sigma Black Belts

Posted on December 27, 2005  Comments (0)

A Question of Balance by Jim Bossert and Larry Krynski, Quality Digest. The articles explores attributes needed by black belts: personal, technical ability, training, experience, aptitude and culture.

This article examines “each attribute to see how it contributes to selecting the right candidate. Organizations can use the information when interviewing candidates, knowing that whomever they select will contribute to the success of their Six Sigma projects.”

Inside Google

Posted on December 26, 2005  Comments (0)

A View Into Google’s Inner Workings by Dan Farber:

Merrill listed the following attributes of Google’s development culture:

Hire smart people who are nice to work with
Flat management structure
No silos, open communications
Ideas mailing list
20 percent (time spent on personal projects)
Small projects
Iterative design, constant improvement
Server-based deployment (AJAX)
Test, don’t guess

“Innovation doesn’t happen ‘on the way by,’ it must be design into everything we do,”

Quality, SPC and Your Career

Posted on December 24, 2005  Comments (2)

Lead To Succeed [sigh, ASQ broke the link so I removed it, it sure gets tiring how backwards some organizations till are about using the internet, June 2010] by Stephen S. Prevette:

* Succeed as a quality professional by branding yourself and providing a service or product your manager and organization deem worth paying for.
* Lead your manager “your customers” by providing the data they need in a form they can understand.

This is a great article on how to apply quality (Deming, Statistical Process Control, Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing) ideas and move forward professionally; even when those ideas are not always shared by the organization.
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Six Sigma Government for Liberia?

Posted on December 22, 2005  Comments (0)

Using Six Sigma to Reinvigorate Public Corporations by Andre Pope

There must be a national policy that spells out the performance metrics for public corporations. The NPCC will then be charged to evaluate the performance of each public corporation on a quarterly basis. These evaluations will then become benchmarks for judging progress and improvement.

Unfortunately often in government even once good measures are set, see Millennium Development Goals, things still fail. Still this is a good goal. Oregon has done a good deal of work in this area (here are some slides from Washington state.

Rebirth of American Industry

Posted on December 21, 2005  Comments (0)

William Waddell excellent posts on the Evolving Excellence blog are always an interesting read. He, and Norman Bodek, have published a new book, Rebirth of American Industry. Read the full Excerpt from the book. The Evolving Excellence blog also has a post: A New Must-Read Book – From Our Own Bill Waddell.

Norman Bodek has also written: Kaikaku, The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy Kaizen (with Bunji Tozawa) and The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy Kaizen (Workbook) (with Bunji Tozawa). He also recently started his own blog: Kaikaku.

Articles by Norman Bodek:

  • The Best Factory in the World, from his book, Kaikaku: “Pictures of areas of the factory or the office hung throughout the plant. Workers were encouraged to look at the pictures and talk about them together, then to make improvements.”

    • Read more

Should GM be Removed from the DJIA?

Posted on December 21, 2005  Comments (3)

Topic: Investing

Should Dow boot GM? by Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com:

GM’s market capitalization has fallen to about $11 billion, less than half that of the next smallest Dow stock…

“It is coming,” he said of the idea of a foreign Dow component. “This whole globalization situation is making that more and more likely.”

He said he doubts that GM would be replaced as long as it is still the world’s leading automaker, but Toyota could claim that title from GM as soon as 2006.

“That would be the time to replace it, not before,” said Hirsch.

I agree removing GM makes sense, though I see no reason to wait. Whether to replace it with Toyota (market cap: $167 Billion), DaimlerChrysler or something else is an interesting question. Of course the whole idea of the Dow Jones Industrial Average pretty much outlived its usefulness decades ago. The S&P 500 has long been far better measure of the stock market but still the dow has retained its status as news worthy, for some reason (View the current dow stocks).
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Lean Health Care: ThedaCare

Posted on December 21, 2005  Comments (0)

ThedaCare Shares Lean Secrets (link broken, so removed):

ThedaCare adapted the lean business practice technique commonly referred to as Toyota Production System two years ago after a visit to the Ariens Co. in Brillion. There, ThedaCare officials saw firsthand how the process was implemented.

“We were there and within 15 minutes, I knew this was the improvement system for us,” said Roger Gerard, ThedaCare’s chief learning officer.

Each week, ThedaCare has several rapid improvement events or RIEs. During that process, people from both in and out of the area affected look at an issue – for example the daily step pattern of medical surgical technician – and find ways to cut out the waste. Team members then develop a process, put it into action and see the results.

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TPS v. Lean Manufacturing

Posted on December 19, 2005  Comments (1)

Great article from Superfactory, TPS vs. Lean and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Art Smalley:

Real TPS is not just about “flow”” or ““pull production”” or ““cellular manufacturing”” or any of the other catchy phrases or tools you may frequently hear. For over fifty years TPS in Toyota has been primarily concerned with making a profit, and satisfying the customer with the highest possible quality at the lowest cost in the shortest lead-time, while developing the talents and skills of its workforce through rigorous improvement routines and problem solving disciplines. In every piece of TPS literature from Toyota, this stated aim is mixed in with the twin production principles of Just in Time (make and deliver the right part, in the right amount, at the right time), and Jidoka (build in quality at the process), as well as the notion of continuous improvement by standardization and elimination of waste in all operations to improve quality, cost, productivity, lead-time, safety, morale and other metrics as needed. This clear objective has not substantially changed since the first internal TPS training manual was drafted over thirty years ago.

This is a great article, I strongly recommend reading it.

Nonprofit Baldrige Award

Posted on December 18, 2005  Comments (0)

Nonprofits Can Apply for Baldrige Quality Award in 2007:

Starting in 2007, nonprofit organizations—including charities, trade and professional associations, and government agencies—will be eligible to apply for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest Presidential honor for quality and organizational performance excellence.

Planet Kaizen

Posted on December 18, 2005  Comments (1)


Toyota has a section on their web site called Planet Kaizen: “what happens when you dig a little deeper and peel back the sheet metal to discover what makes a Toyota a Toyota.”

It requires flash to view Planet Kaizen. I think it has amazingly bad visual controls (as do many flash applications). I can’t figure out why it would be done in flash – other than some marketing person, or IT person, thought it would be cool. I certainly don’t see how kaizen practices could have produced such an application. It seems to me one of the examples of how far Toyota still has to go.
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Bad Visual Controls – Software

Posted on December 18, 2005  Comments (2)

Bad Visual Controls Example: Software via Lean Manufacturing Blog. Funny example. If I had to use it I might use a different adjective.

In the example, the software uses icons that are not obvious. The user has pasted labels on their monitor with text description of each icon. The labels are smaller than the icons.

Some resources for web usability and software usability “A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.” (that is pretty hard [impossible actually] to accomplish when the user doesn’t have a clue what will happen).

Joel Management

Posted on December 17, 2005  Comments (3)

Topic: Management Improvement, Lean Thinking

Joel Spolsky writes the excellent Joel on Software blog and runs Fog Creek Software. Recently he has been writing about process improvement of the order fulfillment process for a movie on the experience of interns at Fog Creek Software, How to Ship Anything by Joel Spolsky

Shipping an international order now takes about 35 seconds, down from 3 minutes, and can be done by anyone, whether or not they have SQL and Mail Merge skills. Domestic orders are even faster since they don’t need customs forms. Most of all, it’s all really fun.

Joel is a great writer and tells a interesting story about of how they improved the process. This is one of a series of articles on the process improvement around order fulfillment for the documentary made of “project Aardvark”:
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Visual Work Instructions

Posted on December 17, 2005  Comments (4)

Via Got Boondoggle? Shorter Text for Visual Work Instructions by Steven Blackwell:

The line worker may not even read text that seems excessive. We have spent the last eight years observing line workers using visual work instructions and asking them if they read the text. If the text is a short sentence, the answer is usually “yes.” If the text is more than one sentence long, the answer is usually “no.”

Another recent post, Poka-Yoke Assembly (also prompted by Got Boondoggle?), also discusses the importance of well written (short) instructions.

In writing minimal text, we recommend the sentence structure, “Verb NOUN with NOUN using NOUN.” An example is given in the following illustration, “Cut CABLE to LENGTH as shown using SCISSORS.” That includes 8 words, as opposed to 82 in the original example, only 10% of the original length.

Engineering Education: China, India and the USA

Posted on December 13, 2005  Comments (0)

I just added a post, USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates, to our Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog on a new report from Duke concerning data on engineering degrees from China, India and the USA: Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate. I think it is a great report. If you have any interest in this topic I strongly recommend it.

Related posts:

Poka-Yoke Assembly

Posted on December 12, 2005  Comments (1)

Got Boondogle asks, Do you Read Instructions Carefully Before Assembly? Nope, I don’t. I expect I can make a quick judgment if I really need to or I basically get it and can put things together well enough. I expect the supplier to make very obvious anything critical.

I am much less likely to read instructions that seem to be written by a lawyer, as I imagine are many others. If they provide simple, clear instructions I will use them (like Ikea provided for this desk I am using now). I find many good instructions require almost no words (they use pictures very well).
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Carnival of Lean Leadership #4

Posted on December 11, 2005  Comments (0)

Carnival of Lean Leadership #4. As usual there are a ton of great links and this one includes links to all the posts from project kaizen.

Enjoy,

Hopeful About India’s Manufacturing Sector

Posted on December 11, 2005  Comments (1)

Why Am I Hopeful About India’s Manufacturing Sector by Indra:

As World Economic Forum Founder and Chairman Professor Klaus Schwab said in recently held India Economic Summit, 2005, “It is indeed important for India to excel globally not only in the services sector but also in the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing in India has become much more sophisticated with the introduction of high technology in many of its production processes. A key priority for India is to provide jobs for its large population and in this regard, the resurgence of Indian manufacturing would generate millions of jobs throughout the country.”

Since India’s manufacturing economy is so small now they would actually see increases in manufacturing jobs. China has lost many more manufacturing jobs than the USA (15 million to 2 million from 1995 to 2002) as previously China’s factories were staffed with millions of workers with no actual work to do.
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The 70 Percent Solution

Posted on December 10, 2005  Comments (4)

The 70 Percent Solution byJohn Battelle, an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new. An example there would be the Wi-Fi initiative.

Google is also well know for the 20% rule for techincal staff (“Google engineers all have “20 percent time” in which they’re free to pursue projects they’re passionate about. This freedom has already produced Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut – products which might otherwise have taken an entire start-up to launch.”). Both models attempt to assure significant time is devoted to new ideas.

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