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A Blog About Understanding TPS and Gaining Its Full Benefits, brought to you by "The Toast Guy"
Browsing All posts tagged under »continuous improvement«
Valu Ngineering
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Overcoming TDD
September 21, 2011
Gross numbers reflecting American productivity can be misleading. When American companies outsource production, the labor “expense” is replaced with the “asset” of inventories purchased elsewhere. While this results in a gross statistical improvement to labor productivity, its overall impact on economic strength is insidious. Consider, for example, these two graphics in particular for the period […]
Bending the Curve
September 14, 2011
America’s form of government, borne out of an ideal of freedom and equality, has, for all of our short-term criticisms, been the object of continuous improvement since its founding. Adapting to social and economic changes, population shifts and growth, technological, environmental and natural resource challenges, what seems to be an immovable inertial monument is actually […]
Mad as H_ll
September 12, 2011
Okay, I admit, some days I get a little upset when I think about the exodus of jobs from our shores. This clip from the movie Network sums up my emotional state at those times. Take a look if you have two minutes. It’s very relevant today. Being involved with many organizations that are prospering in […]
March 5, 2013
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