Lean Manufacturing Needs Lean Retailers by Bill Waddell:

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A Wake-up Call From Asia by Patricia Panchak:

From my previous post, Relative Engineering Economic Positions:

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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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.”

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

Lead To Succeed (pdf document) 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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Using Six Sigma to Reinvigorate Public Corporations by Andre Pope

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.

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.”

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Topic: Investing

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

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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Via Lean Manufacturing blog, ThedaCare Shares Lean Secrets:

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

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

Nonprofits Can Apply for Baldrige Quality Award in 2007:

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 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).

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

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

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

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:

• Worldwide Science and Engineering Doctoral Degree Data
• Engineering Education and Innovation

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

Enjoy,

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

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 byJohn Battelle, an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

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.

Related posts:

• Google: Experiment Quickly and Often
• Managing Innovation