Manufacturing and retail are two closely related industries that depend on each other to succeed. Retail decides which products to buy from manufacturers, while manufacturers need to produce goods that retailers can sell to customers. If there is a holdup from one party, it can affect the productivity and profitability of the other. With both
Continue reading »Deborah Edwards, a logistics management specialist in the Army Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command (AMCOM) Competition Management Office (CMO), recently undertook a Lean training course through the Department of the Army. With this knowledge in hand, she hopes to be able to cut through much of the red tape that bogs down the execution
Continue reading »Financial institutions are often characterized by their perceived inefficiency and red tape. Customers are frequently frustrated by having to wait in long lines to take care of the seemingly easiest of tasks, whether it's opening an account or making a deposit. Great Western Bank heard its customers' complaints and is in the process of applying
Continue reading »AtheroNova, a biotech company that researches treatments for plaque, recently brought a Lean specialist aboard. The firm hopes Joan Shaw, the new senior director of clinical operations, will help the business undergo a Kaizen transformation. Between 2002 and 2012, Shaw served as the executive director of clinical operations at AstraZeneca. Her group was pivotal in
Continue reading »The construction sector was originally thought to be impervious to the economic recession that impacted so many other industries. However, in 2008 and 2009, many builders found that this wasn't the case. Rather, because new projects are approved so far in advance, the impact of the recession was simply delayed. Between 2009 and 2010, numerous
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
Continue reading »The retail industry is known for experimenting with new technology and practices to generate new revenue. In the 1980s, retailers across the United States began branding products with UPC codes that could be scanned at registers to expedite transactions. In the 1990s, the internet boom caused many to shift to the web to offer customers
Continue reading »Amazon has traditionally been known as an online retailer, but the Seattle, Washington-based company is quickly diversifying into other areas. One of the new service packages it is developing, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a cloud-computing platform designed for businesses. AWS is a radical new direction for the company, but Amazon wants to do it
Continue reading »Creating sustainability throughout a product's entire life cycle is an increasingly important consideration for manufacturers, given the rising emphasis on environmental protection. With this in mind, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) incorporated the critical element of sustainability into its three-pronged Lean and Sustainable Product Design (LSPD) service, which
Continue reading »When you think of banks, seldom does efficiency come to mind. Instead, they are frequently characterized by their poor customer service and slow operations – you're likely to think of long lines of people waiting for tellers, transactions that take days to post and getting passed around to different call centers while trying to take
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