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A Blog About Understanding TPS and Gaining Its Full Benefits, brought to you by "The Toast Guy"
Too Happy Too Soon
Our machine shop was assisted by Toyota Supplier Support Center in 1996 to reduce set-ups on our CNC lathes. TSSC had already helped us in a downstream final assembly department, and now we were endeavoring to provide just-in-time delivery to that department from machining. After some study we were able to determine that one lathe […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Accidental Revolution
November 26, 2012
Last week I visited with JVS, a terrific Boston-area organization whose mission “is to empower individuals from diverse communities to find employment and build careers, and to partner with employers to hire, develop, and retain productive workforces.” I was reminded of my first experience with workforce development, one that was detailed in a 1986 edition […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
A Salesman’s Gemba
November 13, 2012
Bob was an outside salesman in from the field for a sales meeting at the plant. We asked him to stop by to participate with a problem-solving team assigned to one of his customers, ABC Company. We’d tried everything, so we thought, to correct a defect in a product that we produced for ABC. The […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
A Better Class of Prisoner
October 25, 2012
I attended a very nice presentation recently by a person who has been leading the Lean charge for several years at a major medical center. As he reflected on key elements of his organization’s success, however, he made a statement that set off my crap detector: “It’s most important to start with good people,” he […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Mental Muri Migraine
October 9, 2012
It’s funny, hosting a bunch of Lean thinkers as we did at our recent Northeast region Shingo Prize Conference, that participants tend to be constantly on the lookout for small improvements, sometimes humorous ones like the one depicted below. Forgiving the poor photo exposure, can you see the inconsistency? Bathroom confusion. After a laughing conference […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Lead With Humiliation
October 4, 2012
Very early in my Lean adventure as a new VP of Operations, when the idea of listening to workers was still a little strange, I returned from a week vacation to find that two of my peer managers had teamed up to convince the company president that I had “turned over the asylum to the […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
Learning To Share
September 18, 2012
There’s just one week left before our Northeast region Shingo Conference, so here are some final words about sharing, which is the theme for this year’s conference: As youngsters, sharing relates very specifically to things that are ours – toys, games, blankets, food, — the physical parts of our existence. But as adults, sharing is […]
Posted in: Old Lean Dude
December 20, 2012
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