By Bill Waddell (Note from Mark Edmondson: Here’s a recent article written by LEAN Affiliate Bill Waddell that I think many of you will find interesting.) The terms “Lean Manufacturing” and “Japanese” are hardly synonymous. This may come as a…
by Mark Edmondson This post may be shameless about poking fun at a real software product, but I couldn’t resist: Make better business decisions faster Achieve increased profitability Drive operational improvements Substantially decrease total cost of ownership Standardize best practices…
By Mark Edmondson As a lean professional, here are two facts you already know about you and your company: 1. Over 95% of your body mass consists of water. 2. Over 95% of your company’s activities consist of waste. Yet,…
By Mark Edmondson Seth Godin’s (author of Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars) blog often has pearls of lean wisdom – even though he’s a marketing guy. Check out his recent post, “Please Hold”, wondering why companies spend so…
Article Link By Mark Edmondson Do you experience lumpy product demand? Do you suffer from “outsourced manufacturing and third-party logistics across a multi-enterprise network”? Has “demand management, transaction processing, and order fulfillment using paper-based systems led to excessive amounts of…
By Mark Edmondson Bill Waddell’s post on Evolving Excellence makes a humorous yet tragic point about how lean is too often confused with outsourcing. Prepare to laugh out loud and cry. Real story: This year our team visited an $800…
By Mark Edmondson Today I went to the local post office to buy holiday stamps and Priority Mail boxes. (An aside: Priority Mail for gift parcels is a great deal – you can cram as much stuff as possible into…
From Mark Edmondson: Peter F. Drucker passed away on November 11, eight days before his 96th birthday. Since he was a professor at Claremont Graduate University while I attended neighboring Claremont McKenna College in the late 1970s, I had the…
Our consulting firm has two HR requirements before we’ll work with a client: 1. No regular employee will lose their job as a result of improvement activities. 2. No “forced ranking”. This means that there is no ongoing practice for…
