ARNnet – Dell hires Solectron CEO, forms operations group A frequent theme of mine is that Dell should not be lumped into the category of “Toyota Production System” companies even though many people (including some respected lean gurus) call Dell…
Economist’s View: Hal Varian: Kaizen, That Continuous Improvement Strategy Here is a good lean piece from an unlikely source: an economist! Hal Varian (via the the “Economist’s View” Blog) writes: Remember when Japanese manufacturing techniques were all the rage? You…
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…
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…
Quite some time ago, I wrote an article titled Getting Lean Right. I included a quote from someone which I did not have a reference for. I thought it was an important point to share, but I recently got an…
Here is the actual ad that ran during the game, after seeing the preview here. If you’re reading this via RSS or a news reader, come visit the actual blog page to view the commercial video. So, the “joke”…
Fatal Dose: Ohio Girl is Killed By Medical Mistake Here is a sad story of a girl’s death due to a hospital pharmacy mistake. Pharmacies oftentimes just repackage and dispense “off the shelf” drugs (such as pills), but they often…
Airbus cuts costs by learning from auto industry – MarketWatch Here’s an article that talks about Airbus and their lean efforts. The moving production line, which Airbus calls “lean manufacturing,” breaks with previous civil aviation industry practice whereby aircraft were…
Productivity Cafe: Stop Junk Mail Lean Blog reader Osvaldo brought this up as an example of waste — mail that ends up in your mailbox (catalogs, solicitations) that goes right into your garbage can. Apparently, it’s “National Junk Mail Awareness…
Kevin, M.D. – Medical Weblog: A woman dies after receiving 8 grams of Dilantin I read about this on the blog linked above and the source article is here. A nurse administered an incorrect dose to a patient, TEN TIMES…
NPR : Suit Maker Goes ‘Lean’ to Keep Jobs in U.S. I’ll comment more on this later, but this was on NPR this morning. Overall, positive mentions of lean, although there was a common complaint from a worker about having…
From the Northwest Lean Network email listserv, about a week ago: ” I am looking for experiences using lean practices and tools in fruit juice businesses.” I’ve seen a lot of this, people asking for very specific examples of lean…
