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A Blog About Understanding TPS and Gaining Its Full Benefits, brought to you by "The Toast Guy"
Hello world! Welcome!
Welcome to Bruce Hamilton’s (aka The Toast Guy from Toast Kaizen DVD fame) Blog, an on-going reflection on Lean philosophy and practices with an emphasis on keeping good jobs close to home. That’s the mission of my organization, GBMP, a Boston-based not-for-profit organization with the parochial objective of shipping products overseas rather than jobs. […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Lean Transformers
April 23, 2013
A few years ago, after I gave a speech on Lean at a meeting of the Transformer Association (like the kind on the telephone poles providing electricity to your home), my then six-year old son, Ben, asked me if I’d met Megatron. His question caused me to chuckle at the images we assign to our […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Lean Avoidance
April 1, 2013
I went to the gym this morning, April 1, and the gym’s owner, sole employee, and pretty much everyone’s personal trainer, Howie, asked me the same question he asks me every time I see him: “What’s your weight?” “Stayed the same,” I said, but jokingly added, “Actually, I’m ahead of the game because yesterday I […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Valu Ngineering
March 5, 2013
My son, Ben, asked me last week, “How come the bacon cooks better on Grandma’s pan?” I’d just fried up some bacon using a pan handed down from my mother, and the bacon was, as Ben noted, much more consistently cooked. I answered my son’s question: “Value engineering,” I said with private sarcasm. Value engineering […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Early Bloomers
February 26, 2013
This winter has presented folks in my clime with a perpetual blanket of snow that hides most of the welcome signs of an approaching spring. There is one early bloomer, however, that blossoms each February, even as temperatures fall to the single digits as they did last week. The small yellow and very fragrant flowers of […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Death by Efficiency
February 11, 2013
I was reminded this week how problematical the conceptual blind spots in our management systems can be: An otherwise insightful and passionate-to-improve organization that I was visiting was caught in a vicious production cycle that I’ll refer to ineloquently as “piling on.” That is, each department, struggling to be efficient, was overproducing to the max, […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Repetitive Madness
January 11, 2013
My last post about superficial improvement may have implied that the condition is limited to organizations with deep enough pockets to buy pricey automation. There are also plenty of opportunities for superficial improvement in small shops. Here’s an example of a manual assembly waste that took years to eliminate: The product was housed in a […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Superficial Resolutions
January 4, 2013
As we begin another new year, here’s a post about resolutions. In most organizations there are plans for something new in 2013 – maybe a new product or market, or a new machine or facility. For those of us in the Lean world, new also means re-new – getting better with what we already have. […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
November 19, 2010
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