Jun 29 2018
Costs are the object of heated arguments when working to improve manufacturing operations, with participants assuming that the notion of cost itself is self-evident while, in fact, they understand it differently and talk past each other. This is an attempt to bring some clarity to the subject.
Jun 8 2018
My colleague Kevin Hop drew my attention to this video of Kazuhiko Furui showing some examples of Karakuri Kaizen at Toyota, the training of Toyota employees in coming up with new devices, and the iterations that go into making them work. It goes deeper into the topic than the videos I had posted earlier.
This is part of a series of videos called econohito, that shows actions by Toyota employees to avoid wasting power or water, and to collect electricity from solar panels. Perhaps the best way forward for sustainable development would be to shift away from cars altogether, but that’s not what this is about.
Jun 2 2018
This elaborates on the section on Analyzing The Data of the previous post. For a list of tools used for “data mining” or “machine-learning,” I researched, for each one, who invented it, when it was invented, for what purpose, and what applications it has had in manufacturing, and summarized my findings in the table below.
I am, however, not satisfied with the level of applications I found and would like to crowdsource more. If you have made these or other tools useful in your own manufacturing environment, please share whatever information you can about your applications in the survey that follows.
May 31 2018
“Are we in the Lean Community lacking imagination and creativity? Indeed, do we take away the time and space for creativity and imagination from employees with our focus on standardizing work and our relentless process analysis […]? Or maybe this is backwards. Is it possible that […] a stable organization with stable processes enables successful innovation? […] Contrast Toyota’s methods with those of other companies generally believed to have brilliant, innovative ideas but no robust development, production, supplier management or even customer support processes, and which are short of funds. Not just Tesla but the whole VC-backed auto start-up industry come to mind.”
Sourced from The Lean Post
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
I don’t understand why Jim Womack restricts the discussion of stability and innovation to the car industry and the comparison with other companies to “VC-backed auto start-ups” that are short of funds. Toyota’s leaders grew the company by doing what they had to do to navigate the Japanese car industry. It is, in retrospect, a spectacularly successful model and worth studying. It is not, however, universally relevant.
Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, we view it as the worldwide hub of innovation, not the Nagoya area. Local entrepreneurs, VC-backed or not, have given us multiple generations of companies that are not exactly short of cash, like Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, eBay, Netflix, Google, Facebook,… Some of them are dabbling in the auto industry but most of their revenues come from elsewhere. It doesn’t make their practices and business models any less worthy of study than Toyota’s.
May 23 2018
If you google “data-science + manufacturing,” what comes back is recycled hype about the factory of the future. The same vision has been painted before and hasn’t come to pass, yet we are expected to believe that it will this time and that it will be a “4th industrial revolution.” Whether it’s true or not, this happy talk is no help in today’s factories. “Data science” covers real advances in the art of working with data, and the more relevant question is what it can do to improve existing operations.
Jul 5 2018
Managers Should Rethink Rational Decision-Making | Michael Ballé | McGrawHill BusinessBlog
“Managing is making decisions, right? Managing well is making rational decisions – or so we’re told. We’re so steeped in a culture of “rationality” that we’re no more aware of it than a goldfish is aware of the water in the bowl. Yet rationality is a made-up thing, a construct, invented in Germany in the XIXth (as opposed to “reason” or being reasonable, which has been around for a much longer time and is much harder to define). Rationality implies that our actions are in line with the outcomes we seek – the reasons for these actions – premised on the idea that our beliefs are in line with our reasons to believe….”
Source: McGraw-Hill Education Business Blog
Michel Baudin‘s comments: The title of the article appears to promote irrational decision making, which should be a hard sell. Michael Ballé seems to know what a goldfish is aware of, and I wonder how. According to Etymology OnLine, “rationality” actually is a 17th-century French word and, to this day, means the quality of being based on reason, not of being “aligned with a goal.” The German connection, perhaps, is Max Weber who described goal alignment as one of two subcategories of rationality in social behaviors (“Zweckrationalität”) in Economy and Society, a book published in 1922, after his death — that is, in the 20th century, not the 19th.
If you are a Lean expert, no one expects you to discuss German philosophy. If, however, you choose to go there, it helps if you start with a paragraph that withstands a 5-min fact check on Google. For an analysis of management decision making, I prefer to start with what Kaoru Ishikawa said in his book on TQC.
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 3 • Tags: Decision making, Kaoru Ishikawa