Why do many of our best companies move to China or other countries? Some do it for the lower labor rates, but just as many move because they can’t find skilled labor, engineers and other resources here in the U.S.…
Lean is very prevalent in manufacturing because manufacturing needs so much help. Jobs are being lost and profits and struggling, and so lean is one lever people try to pull to salvage the situation. Now that the healthcare industry is…
This particular post is about as overdue as my contributions to LeanBlog, but it’s always better to be late than never. Given how far industry has come, and in the spirit of how far we have to go, I thought…
by Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean Decades of knowledge in lean have been passed on, written down, turned into curriculums and even documented in the annual reports of some companies. But why do so many fail…
Although I haven’t been posting in the blog recently (sorry), I have been doing some writing, and thought I would share some of that with you now. I continue to support Assembly Magazine with the monthly Leading Lean column. Assembly…
The reason Andy Carlino and I named our book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road is that we felt that not only was a company to go on a lean journey that never ends, but also the…
Here are the two most recent “Leading Lean” columns from Jamie Flinchbaugh: April 2007: Consistency Erodes Skepticism Here, Jamie maps out “a route through the terrain of skepticism” that we often face as Lean change agents. May 2007: Forging Your…
Blog reader Darrin wrote and asked: Do you have any up-to-date sources for “word-class” numbers for lean metrics like % of Leadtime that is wasted, % yields, etc.? I know I’ve seen numbers for benchmark “% value added time”, etc.…
ASSEMBLY Magazine Jamie Flinchbaugh has a new “Leading Lean” column in assembly magazine. Here’s a great story, an example of “because we’ve always done it” waste. “One of the most remarkable examples was a manufacturing company that was finally getting…
Here is the final installment of the lean Q&A, but if you have more questions, please feel free to comment here and I’ll post the best attempt at answers here. Here was lean Q&A batch one and batch two. Q:…
I recently posted some Lean Q&A. These questions came from an Industry Week webcast that I did with sponsor Infor, and there were plenty more questions than time to answer. Here’s the next installment of questions that I received. If…
A few of you may know that a couple weeks ago I did a webcast for Industry Week. For those of you attended, thank you for the great comments. As part of it, the sponsor, Infor, asked me to answer…