TPS – Lean Manufacturing and Process Improvements: Lean Articles An intriguing set of articles about being effective lean leaders, especially when you’ve been managing for years in a non-lean system. The article starts with the blunt assessment: “Whatever your company…
FT.com / Columnists / China Economic Quarterly: This column makes the argument that Chinese companies that buy Western firms maybe aren’t getting such a good deal (such as the Lenovo transaction for the IBM computer business) “For all the ballyhoo…
I had a conversation with another experienced lean person (she is in the auto industry) who commented about how she once saw a business card with a title that was eye-catching: “Director of Discipline” How many of our lean efforts…
I’ve been reading a well-known book about entrepreneurship and small business, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. What continually amazes me about the book is that, written in 1995, it describes…
MySA.com: Business Here is an article the discusses attempts to get suppliers into the official Toyota supplier park near the San Antonio plant. “It is a special situation indeed that the San Antonio plant will have a supplier park with…
Slashdot | The Laptop Supply Chain Slashdot.org commentary (with a link to a free WSJ article). The WSJ article discusses the somewhat hidden laptop supply chain. Dell used to do “final assembly” (just a few last components) in Austin or…
I saw the results of a Harris Interactive online poll, which said only 3.6% of respondents thought “large companies” are “most likely to have good customer service.” Why is that people feel that way? From a lean or TQM perspective…
The Celestica CEO says:“… he noted benefits from restructuring and lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing is a series of initiatives that collectively boost efficiency and is adding about 30 basis points to the company’s bottom line. Celestica is in the midst…
My company is attempting to define and create a “Company Production System,” patterned after TPS. Some of our executives visited TMMK (Toyota Georgetown) and understood the idea that TPS and lean are not just a bunch of tools (like 5S…
ABC News It seems like Chairman Okuda and President Cho keep going back and forth on this in the media. Okuda has said twice now that Toyota should consider increasing prices to help GM and Ford, while Cho said basically…
College of American Pathologists: It’s much more fun to think about what could be (lean healthcare) than what was (GM’s dominance in the auto industry). The early stages of a lean laboratory sound very much like the early lean stages…
GM Plans to Cut 25,000 U.S. Jobs by 2008 – Yahoo! News I’m starting to get sick of beating up on GM. I hate to say it, as a former GM employee, but I agree with the UAW on this…
