Manufacturing

They’re somewhere to park and lock your bike, aren’t they? You can buy them pretty much off the shelf from a bunch of companies that bang them out by the thousand to a range of standard designs. And when things are produced in volumes like that, they tend to be pretty inexpensive. Trust me, I know...
Read more »

Well, car manufacturers don’t seem to be having a good time of it right now, do they (”Hey, Congressman, buddy, can you spare $35bn?”). This might seem good for the environment - after all, transportation accounts for a boatload of our carbon emissions, so fewer cars means less of that going up into the...
Read more »

In yesterday’s post I mentioned at the end that I was going to make a wall chart to track my progress toward my 3,000 bike miles goal. Adrian Finch (an aspiring 5,000 mile hero) asked if I use My Cycling Log, bikejournal or CycleSmart to keep track of my progress, and my reply was that...
Read more »

Right now I’m working with a firm to help improve their production output. They’re suffering from the usual problem - too much work in progress (WIP), caused by a production manager who wanted to ‘get ahead’, by manically over-producing at the start of the process flow. The line manager I’m working with understands this, and...
Read more »

DailyKaizen » Hoshin 102 I think I should buy shares in 3M - the people who invented Post It Notes. I seem to use them all the time when running workshops - they’re a great tool to use for rearranging complex information, to try and make sense of a problem. One of the main techniques I...
Read more »

Mark Graban at Lean Blog’s just finished reading Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister, and raises an interesting point: “Quality Work Does Not Mean Quality Service” ‘Work’ is the stuff you do, while ‘Service’ refers to the overall customer experience - what’ll keep them coming back for more. You can do a great job,...
Read more »