Jan 1 2018
What’s Going On In German Companies | Bodo Wiegand | Wiegand’s Watch
Bodo Wiegand heads Germany’s Lean Management Institute. In his latest newsletter, on Wiegand’s Watch, he explains his concerns about the future competitiveness of German companies. Here is my full translation of his article, followed by my comments:
Bodo Wiegand: “A huge potential is not realized and simply left fallow – can we really afford that?
I think we cannot afford it.
In China and India, more engineers are trained each year than we have in Germany in total, and then we fail to exploit the huge potential of the engineers we have. Why? Because we do not want to give up our fiefdoms, our functional thinking and our single-minded concern for our turf.
“[…]The principle of Jidoka applies everywhere, especially if we come down to its fundamental intent: preventing bad quality from going down the line and impacting the customer, understanding the causes of a problem as it happens, and giving the employee the authority (and autonomy) to stop the line when an issue occurs.”
“Six Sigma as a problem-solving methodology causes many hang-ups for Japanese managers. Many Americans seeking training in Six Sigma in Japanese organizations face resistance with little explanation as to why. This often leads to frustration and contempt towards management. They write off the Japanese resistance to the training as resistance to change, preventing growth and feeling unrepresented.
Jan 3 2018
Innovation, Logistics, and Lean
Amonth ago, a reader asked Michael Ballé “If lean really is about innovation, why does so much of it seem to be about logistics, with truck preparation areas, leveling boxes, small trains, kanbans and so on?” His short answer “because logistics is the way into innovation” is a head scratcher and I fail to see any support for this assertion in the rest of his response.While TPS and, more generally, the Toyota Way are innovative in the management and technology of operations, discussions of innovation are usually about products. Even in the car industry, which companies come to mind today about product innovation? Which ones would you want to learn from? Most likely not Toyota but Tesla for its electric cars and Alphabet/Google’s subsidiary Waymo for self-driving cars, both based in Silicon Valley.
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 1 • Tags: innovation, Lean, Lean Logistics, Logistics