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Category Archives: Lean thinking
Conclusion of Jim Womack Interview
Interview with Jim Womack part 5 of 5 has been posted by the Lean manufacturing blog. Each part provide valuable insights, from part 4: Toyota has recently said that it will now make a major effort to apply process thinking to dealer networks, probably beginning in Europe, and all of us who buy cars should wish them every success. We are making a major effort in this book to show how a totally different system of sales and service would … Continue reading
Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles
Lean Hospitals
Hospitals Turning Into Lean Machines by Megan Myers (broken link removed): The push toward adopting more efficient strategies in health care largely stems from a crucial need to reduce health care costs. In 2002, health care expenditures in the United States were $1.6 trillion, or 14.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Meanwhile, studies have estimated between 30 percent and 60 percent of the costs of providing health care services is waste. To cut that waste, hospitals are looking … Continue reading
Posted in Health care, Lean thinking
Tagged health care system
Lean Manufacturing: The 3rd Generation
Lean Manufacturing: The 3rd Generation [the broken link was removed] by David Drickhamer: A Toyota executive recently attributed the company’s long-term success to “brilliant process management.” Such processes are everywhere in business, including office and administrative work, areas where Toyota itself is working on how to extend TPS thinking. This is where Couch invokes TPS2, or “business-process kaizen,” and the challenge of dealing with non-physical inputs and outputs and much longer time frames than on the shop floor, such as … Continue reading
Interview with Jim Womack
Q&A With Jim Womack by Mark Graban: The whole idea of lean solutions is to start with today’s customer in today’s circumstances and ask what the customer really wants. When we do this, the first thing to note is that manufactured goods have gotten vastly better, somewhat cheaper James Womack also lists the six principles of Lean Solutions which seems to be boil down to one of the principles: “Get me exactly what I want” (though the way he describes … Continue reading
Posted in Lean thinking, Management
Tagged lean manufacturing, Womack
Toyota Supply Chain Ideas for Big Box Stores
Teaching the Big Box New Tricks (bozos at Fortune deleted the web page so I deleted the link) – What Toyota knows about supply chains – and how to apply it to almost anything, even megastores – from Fortune. At the RDC, cola is now received directly from the supplier’s bottling plant in wheeled dollies. They are rolled directly from the supplier into the delivery truck to the stores. And once at the stores, the dollies are rolled directly to … Continue reading
Posted in Lean thinking, Management Articles
Tagged Womack
The Power of Why
NUMMI Tour Tale #3: The Power of Why by Mark Graban: Again, another “wow” moment. For one, NUMMI put the situation in customer terms. Do not use these parts, because there would be a negative impact on the customer. It didn’t say “do not use the parts because I say so (and you wouldn’t understand the reason anyway)”. … Why are we doing lean? Why is it necessary to standardize our workbenches? Why is it important to get these parts … Continue reading
Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Manufacturing
Toyota Manufactures More Itself
Bucking the trend, Toyota controls quality, cost by making many parts in house [the broken link was removed], AutoWeek via Lean Manufacturing Blog: On one hand, the company sees parts making as a critical piece of its overall quality-control program. Toyota argues that keeping some parts in-house actually makes it more efficient. Outsourcing parts simply to meet the changing industry norm is viewed warily by Toyota executives. “I don’t believe we can outsource our responsibility to the customer,” Seizo Okamoto
Go Lean to Remain Competitive
Go Lean to Remain Competitive [the broken link was removed]: Captains of industry should adopt Lean Production Systems, an idea {conceived} by Toyota for its car-making, to transform their plants to efficient ones, for survival in the globalisation era Sundaram Clayton Limited Brakes Division President C N Prasa. In 1998 the SCL Brakes Division won the Deming Prize and in 2002 they won the Japan Quality Medal. Sundaram-Clayton Limited [the broken link was removed], Mission: We are committed to being … Continue reading
Posted in Deming, India, Lean thinking, Management
Tagged Asia, Deming, lean manufacturing, Management, Manufacturing
Why Fix the Escalator?
Why Fix the Escalator? from the Lean manufacturing blog on a visit to the NUMMI plant: A very large permanent sign above the escalator said something like: “Sorry for inoperative escalator. It would cost $120k to repair. We feel money could be better spent on other things. Please accept our apologies.” Wow. The frugality and practicality of TPS was illustrated by that sign, our tour group thought. Rather than a knee-jerk reaction of fixing it when broken, somebody asked that … Continue reading
Eliminating Complexity from Work
Eliminating Complexity from Work: Improving Productivity by Enhancing Quality [broken link replaced with link from the Internet Archive] by F. Timothy Fuller. National Productivity Review, Autumn, 1985. A case study of a process improvement from 1985. as much as half of the activities of about sixty people had been to set up and take down jobs, expedite, move material, count material, and do other tasks that were unnecessary in the new process. Related: productivity improvement articles and links
Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Manufacturing, Process improvement
Tagged lean manufacturing, productivity
Marketing in a Lean Company
Where Is Marketing In All of This? [the broken link was removed]: The problem with all of this is that it is based on the idea that sales and manufacturing are distinct entities, with a one way flow between them, rather than hopelessly intertwined elements of the same complicated business. … An essential element of lean manufacturing is a level loading of demand – or at least reasonably level. Toyota uses pricing to accomplish this. … It is becoming more … Continue reading
Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Systems thinking
Tagged marketing, organization as a system, sales
4 Comments
What’s Holding Back Lean?
What’s Holding Back Lean? [the broken link was removed] by Lauren Gibbons Paul (via Got Boondoggle – another new Lean blog): 2. A short-sighted focus on cost reduction Responding to profit imperatives, many companies are concentrating only on reducing costs rather than looking to lean as a source of greater efficiencies … 3. Emphasis on imagery rather than real work Compared to their Japanese peers, U.S. management is too focused on the trappings of a lean initiative, such as slogans, … Continue reading
Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management
The Best Factory in the World
The Best Factory in the World (site broke link so I removed it) by Norman Bodek (from his book, Kaikaku): This is a story about a time when Bodek asked Shigeo Shingo to take him to the “very best factory in all of Japan.” … 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. … After the visit, I … Continue reading
Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Manufacturing
Lean Manufacturing Webinar
Plant Design for Lean Manufacturing – view webinar archive [I removed the broken link] This webinar archive is a series of slides with an audio track (my guess is the slides should be flipped as you listen though this didn’t happen for me). Use of webinars to present management improvement content over the web is fairly limited at this time. And archived webinars that are available on the public web (not hidden behind locked doors (login required) – whether they … Continue reading
Posted in India, IT, Lean thinking, Management
Tagged Customer focus, internet
Management Improvement in Healthcare
Thinking out-of-the-box Helps Alexandra Hospital Reduce Patient Waiting Time, Singapore News, via Panta Rei. Another example of lean principles being used by government: When looking for solutions to cut patients’ waiting time, Alexandra Hospital took an out-of-the-box approach and looked at a factory’s production line. More specifically, the Toyota production line. … While a team of 12 staff used to screen 22 patients per hour, the same team can now screen 70 patients per hour – a 400-per-cent increase in … Continue reading
Posted in Health care, Lean thinking, Management
Tagged Health care, Lean thinking, Public Sector, Singapore
3 Comments
More Lean Government
Lean thinking ideas are about eliminating waste. Some who believe the government should just be smaller, talk about a lean government, but that is not the same thing as a government that applies the concepts of lean thinking. Toyota is very lean and very large. Most business apply lean concepts with the goal of growing the size of their organization as they are better able to serve customers and compete in the marketplace. The first Public Sector Shingo Prizes [the … Continue reading