defining lean

Lean Buzz – FOTM?

2 June 2010 0 comments

The increasing buzz around Lean makes me worry that it is headed for FOTM status (that is flavor of the month or maybe year)?  It looks eerily like the situation around Six Sigma about 5 years ago.  The increasing buzz about Lean seems to lack much understanding of how it might be used specifically in [...]

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Visual Workplace Definition – How You See Performance in the Plant and in the Office

23 February 2010 2 comments

I wrote previously about the lack of any decent definitions of visual workplace (and visual management) on the web.  In fact, what I found was dreadful.  The original post is here.  Amazingly, Wikipedia seems to have deleted the really terrible definition of visual management that I found before.  Now I only find the Lean Manufacturing [...]

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Whatever Happened to Good Old Fashioned Strong Management Execution

22 February 2010 0 comments

I started thinking about management execution in the wake of the issues at Toyota and discussions with current and hopefully future clients.  The Toyota situation seems to combine some design defects with a fundamental management execution gap in identifying and handling the situation.  We can only guess at these as outsiders, but the management execution [...]

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Rethinking Lean Implementation in the Wake of the Toyota Mess

16 February 2010 0 comments

In the wake of the current Toyota mess, it is time to rethink Lean implementation approaches and even the common definitions of Lean.  Many in the Lean community have long held up Toyota as the ideal.  They are still a great manufacturer, but very clearly not perfect.  In fact, Toyota may have some very fundamental [...]

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Visual Workplace Definition – Have Not Found Any Good Ones

1 February 2010 1 comment

My Japanese colleagues probably reference visual management as often as any other concept and it is easy to see why.  Visual management has broad applicability across a company from the CEO down to the individual contributor, and from manufacturing to finance, to IT.  You might wonder why I have called this a concept.  This is [...]

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Why Lean and ERP?

29 January 2010 0 comments

In many years of improving companies of many types, I have always found that alignment of the supporting technology platforms was critical to implement sustainable change.  Yet, many Lean people I meet are really hostile toward systems.  I empathize with the general sentiment.  Many systems do seem to fight the Lean practices we hope to [...]

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