Dec 17 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
IndustryWeekManufacturing Hall of Fame 2012 Inductee: Robert ‘Doc’ Hall | IW …IndustryWeekFor more than 30 years, Hall has been both a student and strong advocate of Japanese production methods and lean manufacturing techniques.
I still have his 1983 book on my shelf, and it is still useful.
See on www.industryweek.com
Dec 12 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
The incentives are stacking up in favor of making things at home. As General Electric discovered in its Appliance Park in Louisville, Ky., big things can happen when marketers and designers talk to assembly line operators.
Thanks to Kevin Hop for sending me this story. It must be music to Bill Waddell’s ears.
See on www.npr.org
Dec 3 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
What does “Lean IT” mean? Most of those who use this term think of it as the application of Lean principles to the operations of IT companies or departments. To others, including myself, it is primarily about the effective use of IT in support of Lean manufacturing, which is a completely different but very real problems.
The IT departments of manufacturing companies are rarely any help in implementing Lean. The plants’ information systems are full of data about the business and the technology of the plant that is only accessible through the IT department, but its members are busy implementing system upgrades and have no clue what uses this data could be put to.
On the other side are Lean implementers whose computer skills are limited to Excel and PowerPoint, and who underestimate the potential of 21st century IT based on comments made by Ohno in the 1960s.
I looked in vain for any discussion of these issues in the presentations at this summit, although plenty of solutions exist. There could have been, for example, discussions of how data warehousing technology to consolidate data from multiple legacy system into a single, comprehensive source of clean data about product and process specs, the status and history of demand and production, quality, maintenance, inventory, and the supply chain, along with plans for the future.Then it would have been fascinating to hear how tools like the ones Nate Silver applied to US presidential politics could be applied to identifying patterns in this data could be used to allocate products among families and size production lines for each family…
We could also have heard about Lean implementers breaking out of the Excel/PowerPoint box, learning how to design and query databases, and how to judiciously apply data mining tools.
This is about making IT effective, and it should be job one. Then we can worry about applying Lean internally to IT department to make them more efficient.
See on www.lean-it-summit.com
Nov 30 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
The Harvard Business Review, on its 90th anniversary, equates good management with having long-term goals with tough but achievable short-term performance targets, financial incentives to reward high performers and punish underperformers, and a monitoring system to rigorously collect and analyze performance data.
If you don’t have these things, then, by definition, your company is badly managed. After conducting a worldwide survey, the article’s authors concluded that, indeed, most companies are.
Management By Objectives, anyone? I thought we were moving past that debate.
See on hbr.org
Nov 30 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
As the father of Amazon, Jeff Bezos deserves enormous respect, and his statement linking Amazon Web Services to Lean is a homage to Lean worth listening to. With all due respect, however, the connection, as described in his own words, is a stretch. Many businesses pay attention to customers and to the quality of their goods and services, but that is not enough to make them Lean.
“AWS is […] akin to Toyota’s lean manufacturing methods, Bezos said. Why? Both AWS and lean manufacturing aim to remove defects closer to the source.
This lean manufacturing approach to IT — with AWS as a building block, of course — means application developers and data center costs are increasingly aligned. ‘The data center has been an application-free zone for developers. You write code and you have no idea how much it consumes,’ Bezos said. ‘One of the most unappreciated benefits of AWS is that developers get a real sense of what’s really driving the cost.'”
See on news.cnet.com
Dec 20 2012
Manufacturing Hall of Fame: Meet the Class of 2012 | IW Manufacturing Hall of Fame content from IndustryWeek
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
I already posted the citation on Robert W. Hall. This is about the complete list of inductees.
See on www.industryweek.com
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: Awards, Lean, Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing