Category Blog

All Blog Posts

All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.

NUMMI and Worker Health

Inside Bay Area – IBA – Alameda Times-Star – Home Here’s a pretty glowing article about how NUMMI, the Toyota/GM joint venture plant in Fremont CA, focuses on employee health and safety. When I visited NUMMI last year, one of…

College offers sessions on lean manufacturing

Northwest Indiana News: nwitimes.com Here’s a nice article about some community lean training in Indiana. South Suburban College and the Chicago Manufacturing Center created a Lean Academy to teach this manufacturing philosophy to businesses and individuals wanting to increase productivity…

Hidden Costs of Outsourcing

A friend sent me this article from CNN Money. It’s not often that you see a mainstream article that provides data to refute the idea that outsourcing is THE way to reduce costs. The article mostly deals with outsourcing customer…

Re-Discovering W. Edwards Deming

The Power of Purpose It seems that someone is always rediscovering Deming. I gave a lean overview talk to a healthcare audience recently. I was asked afterward by an attendee, “Why didn’t you mention Deming?” Deming certainly played a major…

Fixing GM

Yesterday The Detroit Free Press published a collection of comments from auto industry analysts and GM leaders in a piece titled “5 Ways to Fix GM“ We’ve put a lot on the blog in recent months about the woes of…

Siren Song: Another Ad That Bugs Me

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: SAP’s truth-stretching ads So another ad has made me cranky. SAP is running an ad that claims: The right software can make any size company more efficient, more agile, more responsive. In short, make your…

This UPS Ad Bugs Me

There is a TV ad that runs very often on Fox News, CNN, et. al. for UPS. This ad tries to make the argument that UPS can be a competitive advantage. They compare two companies: “You have overseas suppliers, they…

Tiny Jets

The New York Times published an article today around the F.A.A.’s annual aviation forecast. “In its annual aviation forecast, the F.A.A. projected sharply higher levels of non-airline flights in coming years because of the new planes, called “very light jets,”…

Happy Birthday to the Blog and A New Design

Hello blog readers and lean folks…. Between being busy with work and just not paying attention, the Lean Manufacturing Blog celebrated it’s 1st birthday/anniversary in January. I started this in January 2005, since then there have been 570 posts and…

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