Airline Quality

Posted on April 30, 2006  Comments (2)

The Inmates Are Running The Asylums by Bill Waddell.

For instance, I found something called NWA’s [Nortwest Airlines] “Customer First” Customer Service Guide. Incredibly, it includes the statement, “Ensure that you receive a response to your written complaints within 60 days of their receipt by our Customer Relations department.” That’s right – you tell them about a problem in writing and, by golly, within two months they’ll get back to you.

I flew JetBlue Airways last week. The help at the counter was polite and friendly. While this is only one data point (and hardly a “high bar” to meet) it contrasts with most of my flying experience (in my experience Southwest has a good likelihood of meeting this goal). It would be nice if more airlines could be like Southwest (which manages to be profitable in a very challenging industry – LUV stock info).
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Most Meetings are Muda

Posted on April 29, 2006  Comments (4)

Most Meetings are Muda (Waste) from Got Boondoggle:

I will not waste your time and regurgitate all the expert based meeting protocols like following an established agenda, having a meeting plan, taking meeting notes, etc. All these ideas are great and work well. Instead, I have a list of a few meeting musts that may guide you to more productive meeting time.

The post provides good tips on what to avoid. Given how many people know that many meetings are a waste of time, taking steps to improve meeting effectiveness is a good way to gain some credibility for management improvement activities. Doing so is very visible. Unfortunately, even with the simple and good ideas on how to do better – many meetings that are full of waste.
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Quality Conversation with Gary Convis

Posted on April 29, 2006  Comments (0)

Quality Conversation with Gary Convis by Norman Bodek:

There are two pillars; one is continuous improvement. You might not call this a human issue exactly, but Toyota’s success rests on the need for all employees, all management, to be looking for and striving for continuous improvement and never being satisfied.
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We believe very strongly in what the Japanese call “genchi genbutsu,” the foundation of Toyota’s engineering strategy, which means “Go, see, confirm and be aware with your own eyes.”
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The other pillar of the Toyota way is respect for people and honesty. If you don’t have respect for people who work for the company, you’’re in the wrong business.

More lean thinking articles

More posts on Toyota and TPS (lean)

Why are you afraid of process?

Posted on April 28, 2006  Comments (1)

Why are you afraid of process? by Seth Godin

I spend a lot of time railing against organizations and teams that fall in love with process at the expense of innovation. This is not a post about that.

It’s about the opposite.

Seth Godin does a great job helping people think creatively. I am glad he sees that process management is not in conflict with that. Many others fall into the trap of thinking it is, see our previous post: Not the End of Process.
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Creativity Overflowing

Posted on April 28, 2006  Comments (0)

Creativity Overflowing:

It was clear that Whirlpool needed to reinvent its corporate culture. To do so, it had to figure out the answers to basic questions that managers everywhere struggle with: How do you define innovation? How do you measure success? How do you teach people to be creative?

Related:

Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map

Posted on April 23, 2006  Comments (0)

Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map by Davis Balestracci:

The current design of experiments (DOE) renaissance seems to favor factorial designs and/or orthogonal arrays as a panacea. In my 25 years as a statistician, my clients have always found much more value in obtaining a process “road map” by generating the inherent response surface in a situation. It’s hardly an advanced technique, but it leads to much more effective optimization and process control.

DOE is a tool that is very useful. And while the situations in which DOE is the best tool to use is limited the limited use of DOE is used less than it could be. See more articles on the use of design of Experiments (DOE).

Stop Demotivating Employees

Posted on April 20, 2006  Comments (18)

Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation by David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind, and Michael Irwin Meltzer from the Harvard Management Update:

Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.

Clear, simple and right. Douglas McGregor explored this topic well in 1960. He explained theory X management (managers believe the workers will do only what they are forced, coerced into doing) and theory Y management (managers believe the workers want to do a good job and the managers job is to help them do so) in his excellent book: The Human Side Of Enterprise.
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Blogging is Good for You

Posted on April 18, 2006  Comments (2)

Blogs ‘essential’ to a good career

For those with blogs this is a nice article to read – good positive reinforcement. It is probably a good marketing move to write an article that bloggers will like. Many will then post their thoughts on your article on their blog.

The article is a bit overly enthusiastic still it includes some good points. And these points are especially valuable for those interested a creating a career in management consulting: particularly as an individual or part of a small firm where the individual marketing can make a difference. Marketing is often one of the most difficult parts of making a successful career as a consultant. As the article says:

You can’t make it on your own unless you’re good at selling yourself. One of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of marketing yourself is with a blog.

Lean Accounting: What’s It All About?

Posted on April 17, 2006  Comments (1)

Lean Accounting: What’s It All About? by Brian H. Maskell and Bruce L. Baggaley:

Companies using Lean Accounting have better information for decision-making, have simple and timely reports that are clearly understood by everyone in the company, they understand the true financial impact of lean changes, they focus the business around the value created for the customers, and Lean Accounting actively drives the lean transformation. This helps the company to grow, to add more value for the customers, and to increase cash flow and value for the stock-holders and owners.

This article reviews the thoughts presented at the 2005 lean accounting summit. The 2006 summit takes place in September. Jim Womack, Norman Bodek and Richard Schonberger are presenting at the conference.

See the Curious Cat Management Improvement Calendar

Toyota in the US Economy

Posted on April 17, 2006  Comments (4)

Some figures on Toyota’s economic impact in the USA. Toyota North American vehicle manufacturing totals:

graph of Toyota North American production

From Toyota’s web site: Toyota Manufacturing in the USA: by 2008, Toyota will have the annual capacity to build 1.81 million cars and trucks, 1.44 million engines, and 600,000 automatic transmissions in North America.

The company’s direct employment in North America is more than 38,000 and direct investment is nearly $16.8 billion with annual purchasing of parts, materials, goods and services from North American suppliers totaling an additional $26 billion.

Toyota Touts Impact on U.S. in Billboards:
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Quality and Costs

Posted on April 16, 2006  Comments (0)

finding the balance between quality and cost by Thomas Nolan Maureen Bisognano

One of the steps toward a system for improving value is recognizing that waste removal is an essential component of that system, not just a by-product of defect reduction. To alleviate discomfort with setting aims for cost reduction, senior leaders should:

Set aims for cost reduction while also mandating that quality must be maintained or improved by the effort.

In the article they discuss the view provided by Kano’s model of customer satisfaction – read more about it.
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China’s Manufacturing Economy

Posted on April 15, 2006  Comments (2)

Brad Setser posts on manufacturing comparisons: Have China’s manufacturing powers been exaggerated?

I am all for pushing against over-generalizations that get repeated so often that they become conventional wisdom. The oft-stated argument that France isn’t growing is one example. In fact, France has grown faster than either Germany or Italy over the past few years, and France grew for the same reason the US grew: soaring real estate prices have pumped up domestic demand.

But I would submit that the real story here is the growth in China’s conventional wisdom to improve our understanding of the real situation. I agree with him that the growth in China’s manufacturing sector is the most important story.

But, to me, that story is so over-reported that many get the wrong impression. Read more

The World’s Most Innovative Companies

Posted on April 14, 2006  Comments (0)

The World’s Most Innovative Companies:

Today, innovation is about much more than new products. It is about reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs. Most important, as the Internet and globalization widen the pool of new ideas, it’s about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.
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Consumers increasingly are doing the innovation themselves. Consider Google Inc. (GOOG ), our No. 2 innovator, and its mapping technology, which it opened to the public. This produced a myriad of “mash-ups” in which programmers combine Google’s maps with anything from real estate listings to local poker game sites.
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Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus

Posted on April 13, 2006  Comments (7)

Reddit is a site for what’s new and popular on the web (votes by the user community rate web links). That user community is highly skewed toward software engineers who are a bit irreverent (as some of the language in this post shows).

Today Reddit linked to: Introducing the Dell De-Crapifier… which is essentially a tool to help you get rid of all the extra software you get with the Dell computer. Dell gets paid by software companies to pre-install software on the computer (Google may pay $1 billion over 3 years).

It’s a very dissatifiying experience to pull a brand new computer out of the box and be spammed with a bunch of trial software. After removing all of the crap, ([which] took a significant amount of time) it booted much faster and performed like it should. I kept thinking it would be nice to have an automated way to remove all this stuff. Thus was born the Dell De-Crapifier script.
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Lean Education Academic Network Spring Meeting

Posted on April 12, 2006  Comments (1)

The Lean Education Academic Network (LEAN) is having their Spring meeting at the University of Kentucky in Lexington May 10th – May 12th. This is targeted at educators and students (a fairly small slice of our audience): still it looks interesting so here are some details.

The agenda includes:

Tour Summit Polymer, considered by the Toyota Supplier Support Center to be the leanest manufacturing facility in the US. And a tour of the Lean Boot Camp in groups, meet with students, see learning factories.

The LEAN site includes some presentations from the winter meeting.
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Why You Need a Roth IRA

Posted on April 12, 2006  Comments (0)

Why You Need a Roth IRA by Erin Burt:

If a 25-year-old contributes $4,000 each year until she retires and makes an average annual return of 8% on her investment, she’ll have more than $1.1 million saved by the time she retires at age 65. And the money is all hers — she won’t have to give the IRS a cent of it if she waits until retirement to cash out.
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If that same 25-year-old invested that same $4,000 a year in a regular taxable account earning the same 8% return, she’d only have about $802,000 after 40 years if her earnings were taxed at 15%. That’s more than one-fourth less money than if she’d gone with the Roth.

And the second figure would be less, if the tax rate were higher than 15%. The Roth IRA is a great way to save money. With a Roth IRA you pay taxes on the money you put in (unlike a traditional IRA), but you pay no taxes on the money you take out (once you reach retirement age). The tax benefit of avoiding taxes on the accumulated funds is much greater than the tax deduction up front (if you have a long period of time to invest and your return is good: you also have to consider the difference in tax rates today versus at retirement).

Which IRA Is Best? – short article from Smart Money.

Along with matching contributions from an employer on a 401k plan (where you can get an immediate 100% return and accumulate gain tax deferred) the Roth IRA is where you should invest if at all possible (see more on articles on investing for retirement).

Lean Material Handling

Posted on April 11, 2006  Comments (0)

Don’t Ignore your Water Spider a great post by Mike Wroblewski:

The second night was little better and I quickly evaluated the improvements from the night before. Later that second night, I made more improvements. Each day, I continued the cycle of experimenting with the improvements and making adjustments to see what worked best. By the end of the week, my pedometer reading hit only 10,000 steps or five miles and not one line operator had to get their own parts or screamed for me the entire shift.

More lean manufacturing articles.

Leading Lean: Missed Opportunity

Posted on April 10, 2006  Comments (0)

Leading Lean: Missed Opportunity by Jamie Flinchbaugh:

Three elements are needed to gain the benefits from using pull production to drive problems out into the open. First, you need strong problem-solving skills. Bringing a problem to the surface is only half of the battle-you still have to correct the problem. Second, you need an infrastructure capable of solving problems. This means persuading employees at all levels to respond to problems in real time. This does not happen overnight. Third, and perhaps most important, you need a culture that values solving problems as prevention, not crisis management, and is willing to step up even if the problems seem small at the moment.

Great points. One of the counter intuitive things with lean is to make problems visible. So often people try to hide problems (which inventory can do – making it difficult to see emerging problems and to diagnois problems once they are finaly discoverd). Read more

The Art of Customer Service

Posted on April 10, 2006  Comments (1)

The Art of Customer Service by Guy Kawasaki:

4. Don’t point the finger.
This is the flip side of taking responsibility. As computer owners we all know that when a program doesn’t work, vendors often resort to finger pointing: “It’s Apple’s system software.” “It’s Microsoft’s ‘special’ way of doing things.” “It’s the way Adobe created PDF.” A great customer service company doesn’t point the finger–it figures out what the solution is regardless of whose fault the problem is and makes the customer happy. As my mother used to say, “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.” (By the way, as a rule of thumb, the company with the largest market capitalization is the one at fault.)

PBS Documentary: Improving Hospitals

Posted on April 9, 2006  Comments (7)

Clare Crawford-Mason and Llyod Dobyns have teamed up on a new documentary. Previously they created If Japan Can-Why Can’t We? and the Deming Library Tapes.

Good News – How Hospitals Heal Themselves
A One-Hour Documentary Airing on Public Television Spring/Summer 2006
Reported by Former NBC Anchor Lloyd Dobyns

This rare good news documentary reports on a surprising solution to escalating costs, unnecessary deaths and waste in America’s hospitals. Doctors and nurses tell how they did their best, working overtime, while hospital conditions worsened. They were delighted to learn a new way to improve patient care dramatically and reduce unnecessary deaths, suffering, errors, infections and costs without additional resources or government regulations.
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