For Some Manufacturers, There Are Benefits to Keeping Production at Home – WSJ.com This really is a recurring theme in the WSJ, this article starts: “It has long been an axiom that U.S.-made consumer goods such as TV sets and…
STLtoday – Business – Story Here is an overview and general awareness article from the St. Louis paper. It’s always nice to see lean (and lean healthcare) in the general media. The goal is to map out and retool processes…
Business Week: Out At Home Depot As more details about the former Home Depot “leader” and his “leadership” come out, it’s a sad case study of bad leadership (written about earlier, at risk of being accused of Shadenfreude). Why am…
Tom LaSorda Plebeian Prince (WSJ) Here is a new interview with Chrysler’s Tom LaSorda, a lean leader who has been featured often here on the Lean Blog (some earlier posts here). LaSorda is spending a lot of his time at…
WSJ: At GM, Curbing Inventories Calls For Juggling Act From the article: At the end of December, GM had more than one million vehicles in stock in the U.S. That’s equivalent to about 41,000 vehicles for every point of its…
Toyota bulks up Tundra, hoping to draw a crowd of buyers They go big, but stay lean (or they’re getting “leaner”). It’s been hard to avoid the Toyota ads while watching football, with their new full-sized trucks. Rather than patriotic…
LeanBlog Podcast #15 is a new discussion with a previous Podcast guest, Jim Huntzinger. Last time, we talked about the Lean Accounting Summit. This time, we’re talking about the renaissance of the “Training Within Industry” program. We’ll talk about the…
Hospital cost, quality are at odds In the manufacturing world, the old “mass production” thinking said there was a tradeoff in cost and quality, that high quality must inherently cost more to produce (due to more inspections, high quality materials,…
Kevin Meyer used to do a lean “blog carnival”, so maybe it’s now my turn. There are many great blogs out there and here’s a highlight of what’s been really good recently. Kevin’s blog had a feature on Whirlpool’s understanding…
LeanBlog Podcast #14 is a discussion with Dave Gleditsch, the Chief Technology Officer for Pelion Systems, a leading provider of software for lean manufacturing applications. I first met Dave after I read his Industry Week columns and traded some emails…
Not breaking news, but more article about Toyota’s expected leap to #1 in global auto sales in 2007. The NY Times and the International Herald Tribune both chimed in. All quotes below are from the IHT article. Toyota Motor said…
How Financiers Pursue Profit At Skidding Auto-Parts Maker Here’s another article in the WSJ’s “Wow, we still build stuff here” series (my unofficial title). This article talks about how private equity firms (including Wilbur Ross) are putting money into auto…