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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 »six sigma«
Another Use for Duct Tape
If you want your employees to begin thinking that problem solving is a key part of their jobs, then you have to cease being the chief executive problem solver.
True North Pole
December 23, 2015
Many years ago a small expedition to the North Pole was funded by several American toy manufacturers, anxious to better understand how Santa’s workshop achieved such incredible productivity and just-in-time delivery. “How can Santa produce all those toys in such a short time?” one manager questioned in disbelief as the small group of managers furtively […]
Mistake-Proofing Mistakes
December 8, 2015
There is a popular lore provided by Shigeo Shingo, that the original name for mistake-proofing (Poka-Yoke) was “fool-proofing” (Baka-Yoke). Shingo chided managers at Panasonic for using the latter term, as it was disrespectful to workers, essentially calling them fools. Shingo substituted the word “mistake” for “fool”, because, as he aptly noted, making mistakes is part […]
Overproduction
September 25, 2014
Not wishing to rub salt in the wounds of my beleaguered Red Sox, their meteoric rise from last place in 2012 to first place in 2013 and subsequent plummet to the cellar in 2014 underscores the problems with speculative production. Last week, celebrating a birthday, I was offered a dish of “Fenway Fudge” ice cream, […]
Always Made in America
April 23, 2014
[Blogger’s Note: A couple of important events coming up in the next couple weeks give me an opportunity to showcase a great American manufacturer in this post. First the events: 1) The 2014 Massachusetts Advance Manufacturing Summit, on April 29 at the Worcester, MA DCU Center will feature keynoter Harry Moser, a national champion for […]
Lines
March 17, 2014
As any conference-goer can attest, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line when that line is the lunch line. At Lean conferences like the ones I attend it’s especially incongruous to hear stories all morning about customer service and flow, and then later stand in a long line at the lunch […]
Turkeys
February 25, 2014
Across a large swath of the U.S., the winter has been especially cold, snowy and dreary this year. So here’s a post with a link to a cheery video at the end, just to pick my spirits up – and maybe yours too. The English language can be confounding. For example, the word turkey is […]
January 11, 2016
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