Chicago Tribune | Stuck at side of road: Interesting article here. “Ford, they say, suffers from years of short-term thinking and billions in questionable investments. While it tried to adopt the highly-efficient management strategies pioneered by Toyota, those efforts have…
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…
Where It’s Been For years before starting the blog, I was the “emailing articles out to people guy.” I would often find an interesting article on lean manufacturing or supply chain concepts and would email them out to friends and…
Neosho Daily News Here is a nice story from Missouri about how La-Z-Boy is converting it’s plant (and others) from “batch and queue” to a lean, cellular production layout. Using lean to cut cycle times and costs is a great…
Evolving Excellence: Adventures in Customer Service I was already thinking of blogging on customer service adventures today when I saw the post by Kevin Meyers on his blog. His post is worth reading, as it illustrates how a lean process…
Fortune: Most Admired Companies: Snapshot Toyota is the first non-U.S. based company to make the list, in the #9 slot. The top 10 are GE, FedEx, Southwest, Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks, Johnson & Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway, Dell (falling from #1),…
No, this isn’t a 5S discussion. Every once in a while, I peek at the blog servers stats to see what people search for (on Google, for example) before getting here to the blog. This is just a sample that…
kare11.com :: KARE 11 TV – Auto concept drives Park Nicollet strategy In the news once again, Park Nicollet Hospital in Minnesota is getting media attention for its lean efforts. They claim a $15 million savings over the past two…
Here is the latest exclusive Lean Manufacturing Blog Q&A With Jim Womack, author of Lean Solutions and founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute. We did an extended Q&A late last year, and here are some new responses to our questions…
Article Link I found this story today about the newly developed ‘Paperless’ Boardroom at Toyota. By utilizing and combining IT technologies a boardroom was created that allows for a variety of electronic data management functions. The article purports that this…
This week, Jim Womack sent out his latest email newsletter, entitled “A Tale of Two Business Systems.” The Lean Enterprise Institute has offered up some of Jim’s time to answer a few selected questions about that letter or his recent…
IndustryWeek Series Link Those of you who followed the link to, “Learning from Toyota – Again” from my Adding Value Vs. Reducing Cost post will likely have also seen that this article is the first installment of a year long…