A number of readers have sent me a link to the latest New Yorker missive from Dr. Atul Gawande (whose work I greatly admire). It’s titled “Big Med: Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation.…
As my wife and I are in the process of moving to San Antonio, we’ve visited the local Central Market grocery store there during our house hunting trips. Behind the prepared foods counter is a visual management indicator for employees…
It was a very pleasant surprise that ASQ chose Ari Weizweig, a founder and CEO of Zingerman’s Deli (and other businesses) in Ann Arbor, to be the opening keynote speaker at the recent ASQ Lean & Six Sigma Conference in…
“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” – Robert Heinlein, American science fiction writer (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) With “kaizen,” the Japanese word meaning “change…
I was in L.A. on Tuesday, and I had a little extra time on my way to the Burbank airport, which meant a rare treat…. lunch at the famed In-N-Out. I don’t mean to be that guy who tweets what…
I had an interesting encounter at the Kendall Square Au Bon Pain yesterday morning. Not a bad customer experience, but something I noticed in the checkout process that might be worth discussing. I had a bagel sandwich (wasbai salmon on…
YouTube – Automated Bagel Slicer Right after I posted this link with the Yo! Sushi video last week, I went out to run some errands. I stopped to get a bagel and found this bagel transportation automation and took a…
Here’s a fun video for a Saturday. In England, I love the Yo! Sushi chain of restaurants. It’s basically a continuous flow conveyor belt of sushi. You sit down and take what you want from the belt. The trays are…
By Scott McDuffee: The recent discussion of beignets at the Cafe Du Monde and breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks helped inspire the following. In concert with recent suggestions for using common language to get across lean principles in palatable ways, here…
Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine is an outstanding local restaurant in Fort Worth TX that focuses on local food and wild game. Chef Jon Bonnell is highly rated and is written up in many publications. One article posted on the restaurant…
I’m in New Orleans, presenting this morning at a medical laboratory industry conference, giving a talk about how Lean isn’t just a set of tools or a cost-cutting methodology — it’s a management system, a culture, and (maybe most importantly)…
Starbucks Gossip: Starbucks tests “lean” operations in Ohio and Kentucky stores We’ve known for some time that Starbucks has been trying to figure out how to use Lean principles in their stores. If you click on the “Starbucks” tag at…
