All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Century Furniture is beating the odds (and so can you!): Why are all of the great lean success stories coming from small, private companies you’ve never heard of? North Carolina’s Century Furniture has the following principles, among many, for fighting…
USNews.com: Opinion: Capital Commerce: : Should Uncle Sam Help Domestic Manufacturers? Here’s a US News & World Report online piece that mentions our lean friend Kevin Meyer, of the Superfactory website and the Evolving Excellence Blog (where Bill Waddell also…
Let’s start the week on a positive note…. to borrow a phrase from the Yahoo Group “Healthcare Management Engineers, let’s “dare to share.” What’s something positive that happened in your lean efforts last week? What’s something positive that you expect…
“Welch spreads business gospel from MIT pulpit” Jack Welch himself sure seems like the turkey with comments like this: “Don’t fall in love with your workers,” a business instructor tells a student who’s launching a small startup company. “If you’ve…
“Lean and mean might not be enough” Here’s yet another article about lean with the “Lean and mean” headline. As you know if you’re a regular reader, I hate the phrase. There’s nothing “mean” about lean methods and the lean…
I flew home from Chicago last night and my flight, as most others, was about 4 hours late (I presume due to wind, as it wasn’t snowing). I got home and into bed at 2:30 AM. So, my night’s sleep…
First, if you’ve read The Hitchhiker ‘s Guide to Lean, you will know that we believe the entire concept of deeply understanding our current state is a vital skill and principle to drive performance improvement. I recently penned an article…
This has always been a problem in the manufacturing world — companies selecting equipment that is “biggest, fastest, and cheapest” (or at least “cheapest” in terms of unit cost). To be cheapest, the machine usually has a giant batch size,…
I saw this last week when doing some lean assessment work with a hospital Operating Room and support services. One of the main support services is the department that cleans and sterilizes instruments for the Operating Rooms. As part of…
thefabricator.com’s Blog : What’s Going on in Manufacturing? This blog mentions the same content that Jamie commented on, IndustryWeek magazine’s survey of what improvement methods companies are using. He makes a great point, albeit less important to the core issues…
STLtoday – News – Science & Medicine This was sent to me by blog reader Joe. He was appalled to read about this and I understand where he’s coming from. It’s hard to understand that hospitals can throw their hands…
I have something else to add to my earlier post on the state of lean through the eyes of an Industry Week survey. My point is this: we don’t know what to call this stuff, and at the same time,…
