Thoughts

Born February 29, 1912, Taichii Ohno envisioned a way of working that would evolve into the Toyota Production System (TPS), now known widely as Lean.

Life happens. Sometimes it rains on wedding days. Sometimes a supplier misses a ship date, and sometimes there are glitches in our processes. The challenge for lean practitioners is what to do about this – especially since all of these things could happen.

Did first-class passengers on the Titanic get preferential treatment during the evacuation? James Cameron’s movie certainly seems to suggest so, but let’s look at the data.

So, you have been asked to lead an enterprise wide transformation. How many kaizen events should you plan on conducting in order to achieve sustained improvement?

Recently, a handful of us fellow-lean bloggers had the opportunity to chat about the voice of the customer (VOC). This was not an abstract discussion about someone else’s customers. We were focused on our own – the folks who comprise our blogging community, the lean learning community.

Yes, we were talking about YOU…and whether we were (at least) meeting your needs. Hopefully, your ears weren’t burning.

Multi-Voting, also known as N/3 multi-voting, N/3 voting, dot-voting and sometimes mistakenly thought to be identical to nominal group technique, is a technique used by small groups to quickly select a subset from a broader set of options. This democratic approach allows team member to cast a finite number of votes, with few restrictions (e.g., individuals can’t “plump” all of their votes on one single candidate), for their options of choice. Ultimately, the process yields a rank order.

On behalf of Michael O'Connor, Larry Loucka, and myself, I would like to thank you for investing your valuable time this year reading our posts and sometimes sharing your thoughts. We truly appreciate your readership and we hope that we have, in some way, provided assistance in your lean journey.

In that spirit, some basic holiday lean math follows...

 PEACE ON EARTH + GOODWILL = HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Having trouble deciding what to do?

Some lean math can help!

Resources are not infinite. Often we have more improvement opportunities to work on than we can accommodate. A simple but powerful prioritization matrix can help us sort things out. 

A complex man, born July 30, 1863, Henry Ford developed the automotive mass production assembly line.  His relentless and systematic focus on efficiency and costs reduction resulted in many tec

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was born 165 years ago on July 15, 1848. As an economist Pareto established that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.