Great Post – The Silly Cycle

Just came across a great post here by Christian Paulsen at the Lean Leadership Blog.  He compares the PDCA cycle that Deming preached to the “Silly Cycle” that replaces the PCA with Do, Do, Do.  This post really hit home with the way we run around “doing” things rather than thinking them through. As a [...]

Goalpost Quality – Taguchi Losses and SPC

Delighting customers with a high quality product that performs to expectations is one of the best ways to secure and grow a business. This results in long term security for each player in the extended value stream.  Today I’d like to discuss a couple of perspectives on manufacturing quality products and how it affects customers.  [...]

Insanity Metrics

Remember the saying “don’t put off until tomorrow that which you can do today?”  I developed a new variance of this old saying based on some recent events.  “Don’t put off until tomorrow that which you can do today, unless is clashes with a concrete head metric!” The addition stems around the postponing of a kaizen event [...]

Let people make mistakes? Tough Love of Leadership!

While leading an event this week, I came across a common situation that I have faced over the years.  The group, very new to pull, wanted to implement a particular piece of the pull system in an exact same way that I have failed in a past life.  Despite my best efforts through education and [...]

Remember – We Want to See Problems

Ok, you’ve followed your formula for your lean transformation.  Maybe you value stream mapped, put in some standard work, developed some pull systems, improved your critical changeover times, trained all your teammates, and ran a few simulations.  Now the big moment comes and you flip the switch on the system.  You are now running to [...]

Roundtable 6 – Are kaizen events ‘good’?

The ‘posters’ of the Lean Is Good blog have grown to four in number. Each of us brings a different background and set of experiences around Deming, lean, and learning. How could we leverage this diversity of thought and voice for the benefit of our readers? We ‘planned’ and came up with an idea that [...]

Rountable 4 – Would you rather have 3 good improvement activities or 1 great one?

The ‘posters’ of the Lean Is Good blog have grown to four in number. Each of us brings a different background and set of experiences around Deming, lean, and learning. How could we leverage this diversity of thought and voice for the benefit of our readers? We ‘planned’ and came up with an idea that [...]

Maintenance and TPM and Continuous Improvement

One of the bigger questions your maintenance staff will be asking about TPM is what’s in it for me? I get to train operators in doing portions of my job; operators get to do PM type inspections. What this means to me is my job is leaving and the operator is going to be doing [...]