Management Improvement Carnival #30

Posted on February 29, 2008  Comments (0)

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• How not to improve a process – “It is not enough to think you know what’s right for the process, if you don’t understand how the process works, then don’t play with it”
• A tour of a lean-inspired clinical laboratory by Ted Eytan – “In the design, which involved a labor-management partnership, the team elected to replace a million-dollar conveyer belt system with a $200 dollar cart to move specimens to the work area.”
• Should you hire specific experience, or the ability to learn and lead? by Kent Blumberg – “is the hiring process about what’s easy, or about making a great decision for the long term? I hope it’s about a great decision.”
• Toyota’s Value Innovation: The Art of Tension by Matthew May – “But the implied question for all of us to consider in light of the above is this: are resource constraints enabling or preventing innovation?”
• One Piece Flow versus Mass Production by Ron Pereira – webcast of the traditional “mass production” manufacturing technique square off against the lean “one piece flow” methodology
• Deming on leadership by Shaun Sayers – “We could therefore conclude that a system that is pock marked with such “work-arounds” is likely to be suffering from poor leadership. A tell tale symptom”
• Toyota’s Growth, Globalization, and Training by Mark Graban – “Toyota isn’t stuck in their own past, why should we be?”
• Lego’s Outsourcing Adventure, Part Trois by Kevin Meyer – “Flextronics is one of the world’s largest contract manufacturers and should be able to figure out how to manufacture plastic toys. But what’s even more amazing, or sad, is the turmoil and cost this adventure created.”
• Just what DO you do, while in Gemba? by Joe – “standard work for me is a) to go to the work place and b) take specific actions to reinforce action on the key concerns.”
• 101 Kaizen Templates: Spaghetti Diagram by Jon Miller – “The spaghetti diagram needs very little introduction. Aptly named so because the lines movement drawn on this diagram come to resemble a pile of tangled noodles, it is an movement path diagram by a more appetizing name.”
• Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around by John Hunter – Toyota’s IT expectations: “it demands that the software or technology be flexible and adapt, often by customizing the code, to its business processes, and not the other way around.”