How many trees did your iPhone bill kill? – USATODAY.com As with my petty hotel complaints, here’s another example of a company doing “too much” (the waste of overprocessing). This time it’s AT&T (I’m sorry, they like to be the…
How would you error proof this material handling / logistics situation? I have a few ideas, but thought this would make for interesting discussion. I won’t set up a “spend no money” rule, but cheaper and simpler ideas are always…
I’ll try to lighten things back up a bit. I may have written about this before, but as a frequently traveling consultant, the hotel room is my “gemba” many evenings, so it’s hard not to find waste. I actually gave…
Running a hospital: Our Joint Commission Report The headline is my modification of a Deming expression, that management’s job is prediction. Statistical process control was one way of predicting future outcomes of a process (if you have a statistically stable…
Although I haven’t been posting in the blog recently (sorry), I have been doing some writing, and thought I would share some of that with you now. I continue to support Assembly Magazine with the monthly Leading Lean column. Assembly…
China’s Chery Car: Safe At Any Speed For U.S. Market? – CNBC.com I had a number of readers email me this crash test video of a Chinese car sold in the Russia market. One reader asked what Chrysler was thinking…
Case of the Vanishing Airport Lines – WSJ.com This article made me think of Lean in the sense that Alaska Air radically rethought the passenger check in process and achieved some dramatic results: In Anchorage, the airline expected a 20%…
Green Bay Press-Gazette – Tufco growing operations while keeping safety in focus: Another story from a small company in Wisconsin: “”It is easy to downsize. Growth is difficult,” LeCalsey said. “There are so many draw-offs of profitability in growth.” The…
In the spirit of continuous improvement… I took the book recommendations off of the bottom of the left hand column. I was suspecting that the amazon links were slowing page loads, too much overhead. Are you seeing faster page loads?…
Listen: LeanBlog Podcast #30 is an interview with Bob Emiliani, author of the books Better Thinking, Better Results, and Real Lean: Understanding the Lean Management System (Volume One) (and Volume Two). Bob had a long career at United Technologies, Pratt &…
Watching the news about the tragic bridge collapse in Minnesota, it’s easy to feel helpless, what can we do if something like that happens to us? The odds are very slim, but it *is* a possibility that any of us…
Elegant Solutions: Mind of the Innovator Matthew May is the author of the book The Elegant Solution, a friend of this blog, and a blogger in his own right. He has a new “ChangeThis” manifesto called Mind of the Innovator:…