Medical Leave — Offshore Medicine — Fast Company Interesting read here in the latest issue of Fast Company about a hospital in Thailand and one of the visionaries, Ruben Toral, who wants to globalize healthcare. The idea of patients flying…
Dell to close Austin plant, cutting more than 800 jobs | Statesman Business Blog I’m angry. I try not to blog when I’m angry, so I’ll try to watch my words carefully. Probably won’t succeed. This recent news hits home…
Whistleblower says defects hidden at Toyota-GM Calif. plant Ironically enough, while on the topic of not counting defects (the TSA), this disturbing story was in the Detroit News today. A 23-year employee, a quality inspector, has filed a lawsuit claiming…
Lean manufacturing in action is a beautiful thing The link above is a column in a Wisconsin newspaper. He visited a plant “a few months ago” and is just now writing about it. I guess the lead times in newspaper…
Thanks to a Lean Blog reader, Ryan, for sending this in (click on the ad for a larger image). He asked why BMW would brag about it taking SEVEN years to develop a new vehicle? This is much slower than…
Click here for Part 1 and Part 2 of the series of posts about my visit to Dr. Sami Bahri, the “World’s First Lean Dentist.” In Part 2, I talked about how the Lean “tool heads” might be disappointed, and…
I’ve written before about the “Ask Me” campaign that runs in many hospitals, usually in context of “ask me if I’ve washed my hands.” One hospital runs a slight variation of the buttons and a sign campaign that encourages patients,…
Review By Dean Bliss (bio below): Name of the Book: Lean For Dummies Authors: Natalie J. Sayer and Bruce Williams Publication date: 2007 Book description: What’s the key message? Lean for Dummies, not unlike others in the “Dummies” series, is…
CIO Magazine Article Hat tip to Curious Cat for finding this and blogging about it first. I couldn’t resist chiming in. The author brings up the old Deming philosophy approach that you can’t really motivate people, you can only demotivate…
Case of the Vanishing Airport Lines – WSJ.com This article made me think of Lean in the sense that Alaska Air radically rethought the passenger check in process and achieved some dramatic results: In Anchorage, the airline expected a 20%…
Louisville Slugger: The sweet spot: As the article points out, Kentucky is quite the hotbed of lean manufacturing, with the influence of the Toyota Georgetown plant. Another company claims to have been at it longer, Hillerich and Bradsby, the maker…
Toyota: A Carmaker Wired to Win: Dan Markovitz beat me to the punch, but I also wanted to comment on some things in the article: The article says: “Visit any Toyota plant in Japan, and it’s easy to grin at…