All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Food for thought: When working with the concept (or practice) of Standardized Work in my lean experience, it’s always been in context of a workplace that was already up and running and had, to some extent, “gotten along fine” without…
By Dan Markovitz Sometimes it’s hard to spot errors in an office, much less error-proof the workspace. With so many value streams running through each knowledge worker, and so much of the value being intangible and invisible, error-proofing is tricky.…
Nissan News | Nissan’s ‘shot in the arm’ for healthcare sector It’s not just Toyota working with the Toyota City hospital or GM helping the University of Michigan hospital… Now Nissan is helping a hospital in the UK: And the…
Business Week Article Here’s a good story about how some doctors offices are trying to reduce backlogs and appointment delays, by adopting lean and operations management methods. As the head of a large primary care department at a Kaiser Permanente…
Tecumseh To Close Wisconsin Plant; 320 Employees To Lose Jobs This is a disappointing article after we normally read such good lean news from the state of Wisconsin . Lean isn’t mentioned one way or another in the case of…
I personally believe that hoshin kanri is generally poorly understood and underrepresented in the lean world. To apply PDCA, the most fundamental improvement practice, to business planning and strategy, which is awfully darn important, seems like it couldn’t be a…
The No-Name Brand Behind the Latest Flat-Panel Price War – New York Times: Another article about the Olevia brand (featured here before), which builds HDTV’s in southern California: “Syntax has lined up three factories in China and Taiwan to assemble…
A few weeks back, the British media was having a field day with reports of and complaints about what sounds like a horribly misguided “office lean” effort at a British government office. Read more about it. The picture below is…
GM agrees to change robot suicide ad after objections – Feb. 9, 2007 GM has bowed to pressure from suicide prevention groups, but still doesn’t see anything wrong with firing a robot for making a mistake. Please check out my…
Business Week I don’t think the Danaher story is such a secret to those of us in the Lean world, but Business Week has discovered them, from the article: Danaher Corp. (DHR ) is not nearly as big, famous, or…
GM sticking with robot suicide ad criticized by group – CNN For different reasons than the reasons why I didn’t like the ad, but groups are attacking the “suicidal robot” ad for being insensitive. I still can’t believe that GM…
Minot Daily News Before any of the “fake lean” companies out there get any lousy ideas, let’s discuss this. No, I’m not being paranoid, this isn’t keeping me up at night. But, it’s scary / amusing that companies would think…
