Even if we never find ourselves in the nightmarish futures imagined by The Terminator and The Matrix, people are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the capabilities of machines. Actually, people have been uncomfortable with this for over 200 years. From the earliest days of industrialization in the 18th century, to the 21st century’s upheavals brought on
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Adapting to Customer Demand In Lean, we talk a lot about meeting customer demand. Often, the conversation turns to cycle time, takt time, and how to meet demand just-in-time. Yet, there is another factor of customer demand that people often ignore in this process: What does the customer actually want? You may have an established
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The People Who Would Develop Modern Management and Industry We tend to think of famous historical figures frozen in time. Usually, a few portraits come to define them in the public consciousness. Many of the process improvement pioneers who inspired modern management practices are remembered with gray hair and distinguished faces. It’s easy to forget
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When many manufacturers are looking for advanced machinery to build their products, Toyota is doing the opposite. Toyota is focusing on training their employees to do things by hand, returning to the craftsmen mentality of the company’s humble beginnings. In their Honsha plant, employees are hammering and forging crankshafts by hand, rather than using the
Continue reading »While Lean tools and green methodologies are very different, these business strategies can be integrated simultaneously to maximize performance, as the Grand Rapids Chair Company discovered. The furniture manufacturer chalks this up to the fact that both Lean and green processes are implemented through Plan-Do-Check-Assess (PDCA) cycles. Both Lean and sustainability initiatives need to be
Continue reading »K. Girdharlal International, a diamond company that employs more than 2,000 people at its factory in India, has identified Lean manufacturing practices as being pivotal in the business' efforts to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness. Up until recently, K. Girdharlal had been using more traditional top-down management techniques. However, the organization is now looking to continuously
Continue reading »While Japanese auto manufacturer Toyota was the originator of the Kaizen work practices and philosophies, its leading competitor, Honda, is now looking to stress the importance of continuous improvement with a new series of advertisements. The campaign highlights Honda's penchant for innovation and continued evolution, regardless of the products and services being made. The commercial
Continue reading »So many businesses place their priorities on innovation, discovering new ways of making money and potentially improving operations. However, company leaders and executives need to remember one of the biggest expenses that every organization has to deal with – time. Even more so than money, time is a limited resource. You can never earn back
Continue reading »Disaster can and will strike any business. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc for businesses in the Northeast United States, while earthquakes and tsunamis impacted Japanese companies in 2011. The year before that, rampant flooding in East Asia destroyed components and resources for a number of organizations, setting some back by upward of a year.
Continue reading »ETM Manufacturing, a sheet metal producer, has used Lean practices and concepts to improve internal operations and product quality since 2009. Now, the company is looking to test Lean in a broader sense by applying it to the extended supply chain. One strategy the company hopes to apply is the improvement of workflow. In a
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