Got Boondoggle?: The First Lean Hospital Mike Wroblewski deserves a lot of credit for digging this up…. early attempt at a lean hospital in a surprising place and time (or maybe NOT surprising, once you know “the rest of the…
Paul Pressler’s Fall From The Gap: Saw this in Business Week yesterday: “As part of the supply chain revamping, Pressler also tinkered with the way the Gap brand produced clothing samples. These prototypes had long been made at studios in…
I recently posted some Lean Q&A. These questions came from an Industry Week webcast that I did with sponsor Infor, and there were plenty more questions than time to answer. Here’s the next installment of questions that I received. If…
I got an email last week, from Dan, a long-time Ford employee who took a buyout and is now working on a college degree. He’s looking for a company (local to him in Sterling Heights, MI) where he can do…
I’m down with the flu (and stuck out of town in a hotel room after an attempted early trip home was canceled due to weather) and not much in a good thinking mode…. so thanks to illness-inspired laziness and the…
Why Toyota Is Afraid Of Being Number One In this Business Week piece about Toyota’s fear of a backlash against them, with their continued success, there was this tidbit I found interesting: “That same year [as NUMMI opened], a Ron…
Intel, Motion Develop Tablet PC for Nurses – WSJ.com More news stories via Google. Is this a “siren song” of technology for healthcare? Executives and managers in any industry, it seems, believe in the promise of technology as the solution…
InfoQ: InfoQ Interview: Mary and Tom Poppendieck on using Lean for Competitive Advantage On the page above is the intro to a video interview with Mary and Tom Poppendieck on the topic of “lean software development”. The page with the…
medinnovationblog: Systematic Innovation in U.S. Health Care: Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing Method and Its Application to Health Care A post here from the “medinnovationblog” site. The first one, linked above, gives a pretty good overview of applications of the Toyota Production…
Got a question yesterday from Eric Christiansen, my guest for episode #18 of the LeanBlog Podcast. He asked: Can a company be considered a lean company if it does not use some method of statistical process control? I toured a…
Back to my original post about gaming the system, there are three ways people can respond to pressure to improve: I got an email from an old friend — I’ll keep his name, company, and industry confidential, but he said…
GM Got Gamed (Or, How to Fudge Your Production Numbers to Keep the Boss Happy) TL;DR: At a GM engine plant, fear-based leadership pushed supervisors to falsify production data to avoid punishment. The numbers looked good, but real problems stayed…
