Year 2007

Great Find on an Early Lean Hospital

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…

Cost vs. Nimbleness at The Gap

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…

More Lean Q&A

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…

Carnival of Posts from the Lean Blogosphere

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…

Toyota and "Gung Ho"

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…

Interview about Lean Software

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…

Would Lean Work in Small MD Practices?

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…

SPC and Lean

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…