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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 »shingo prize«
Early Bloomers
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
How Big are Small Ideas?
September 16, 2011
In 1985, when I transferred to an operations role I inherited a production-only suggestion program. I recall that we received sixteen ideas that year of which one was awarded $1,600 calculated as a percentage of one year’s savings. The remaining ideas did not make the cut. So I asked employees for feedback. To my surprise […]
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 […]
Blame Wars
September 8, 2011
My introduction to corrective action, about forty years ago, was a four-part form called an Internal Discrepancy Report, or “IDR” as it was affectionately known. If material was defective we called it “discrepant.” Maybe I’m mincing words here, but I think discrepancy implies a disagreement or inconsistency, for example, a discrepancy between your bank statement […]
February 26, 2013
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