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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 »lean manufacturing«
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 […]
Too Happy Too Soon
December 20, 2012
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
March 5, 2013
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