Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Early in the introduction of Lean in the United States we measured the performance of work cells through the lens of Cycle Time, Talk Time, Travel Distance, and Inventory. From this evolved visual boards tracking performance in the areas of Quality, Delivery, and Cost, with Safety added soon after as crosses to the visual boards next to each work cell. This eventually evolved into People, Quality, Delivery, Cost, and Continuous Improvement (CI). Regardless of the performance measurement suite we settle on, what we clearly understood from the beginning was that it’s all too easy to focus improvement efforts on one measurement while creating problems elsewhere.
Top
Comments
(2 comments)
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Hardly anyone who learns about Lean Management Systems hasn’t also been exposed to this iconic cartoon of a Toyota assembly line worker pulling an Andon cord and the supervisor immediately responding.
If we come at this from our traditional thinking, we interpret the image as one in which the supervisor responds to someone on the line who has a problem so as to help them get back on track. Pretty straight forward stuff at first glance. Right?
Top
Friday, September 6, 2019
Here’s a simple, seemingly innocuous question for lean leaders, “What financial benefits have accrued as a direct result of the (fill-in-the-blank) lean transformation effort?”
Gulp. Simple does not mean easy.
Top
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
In this day and age of hyper-partisan politics, it’s easy to overlook the fact that just below the surface of all the political rhetoric, we have over two million people working day to day jobs in the federal government. And that does not count all the state and local government employees. These are real people with families and aspirations who have chosen to make a career in government.
Top
