All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
asahi.com：Rises in efficiency reduce factory personnel – ENGLISH: From the article: “Toyota Motor Corp., one of the nation’s most profitable and efficient manufacturers, is leading the charge to cut costs. In a speech to company managers in July, President Katsuaki…
MySA.com: Business Notice how Toyota is training their new Group Leaders (2nd level manufacturing managers). They are going to the Indiana plant and learning the process. I’ve never seen a factory where the mangers (yet alone the first level supervisors)…
Inspiration The very funny guys at Despair Inc. have some new posters out, check it out. Please check out my main blog page at www.leanblog.org The RSS feed content you are reading is copyrighted by the author, Mark Graban. ,…
The Globe and Mail: From the article: “It’s not that Toyota hasn’t tried to help the process. Second only to its export of cars is the export of its philosophies. In the mid-1980s, former chairman Eiji Toyoda issued a company-wide…
IndustryWeek : Breakthrough Performance Improvement: Lessons from the Top-Performing Manufacturers in America Industry Week is doing a web conference October 19, featuring Jim Womack. They are giving away an autographed copy of Womack’s new book “Lean Solutions” (coming out soon,…
WSJ.com – Moving On: (requires paid subscription) The topic of “blaming” comes up in today’s Wall St. Journal and this week’s Dilbert strips. Blame has been in the forefront of the Hurricane Katrina “analysis” and follow up. The WSJ article…
Lean Manufacturing Blog: New Balance Shoes Uses Lean I’ve highlighted New Balance before (see the link above for any article from April). I just bought a pair of NB running shoes (not that I run that much), partly because I…
Fixing Healthcare From The Inside, Today Available through HBS… this is written by Steven J. Spear, a former Harvard professor who has written about Toyota quite a bit. He has since left and joined the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, focusing…
NBC 4 – News – DWP: Workers Trigger Outage By Connecting Wrong Wires A few thoughts come to mind reading about this. First off, if a single employee error can cause such wide blackouts, is that more of a systemic…
WSJ.com (requires subscription) (link to a similar free article) It’s tough to avoid the ads for Oreck vacuum cleaners on cable news. After their corporate HQ in New Orleans and their factory in Mississippi were n the sites of Hurricane…
Just as your product value streams require brilliant processes to deliver value, your management team also requires a brilliant management process to lead effectively. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your management process: Quick, where does your team…
Article Interesting concept, although I’m sure it would be a bit annoying as a driver. I can’t imagine people accepting these, even if “not paying attention” is a pretty good root cause for accidents.