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Nov 6 2024

Rebuilding Manufacturing in France | Radu Demetrescoux

Radu Demetrescoux has been a manufacturing consultant for 25 years and recently authored a Lean Toolbox (in French) with actionable details on 64 tools. He has seen the French manufacturing sector losing half its factories and is working to rebuild it. This is how he explains what happened and the way forward. It includes an endorsement of our Introduction to Manufacturing as a contribution to this effort!

The Numbers

Between 1995 and 2015, France lost almost half of its factories and a third of its industrial jobs. In French economic statistics, the industry sector encompasses extraction and refining in addition to manufacturing.  The share of Industry in GDP has fallen from 35% in 1970 to less than 20% currently. The share of manufacturing in GDP fell to 11% in 2017 compared to 17% in 1995.  The objective stated by the government is to quickly increase the share of manufacturing in GDP to 15%.

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StadiumConcertBlog

Dec 30 2023

Greatest Hits of 2023

This blog’s greatest hits of 2023:

  1. Nissan’s Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)
  2. Runners, Repeaters, and Strangers among Components
  3. Where do “Value Stream Maps” come from?
  4. The Fox Knows Many Things, But The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing
  5. Deming’s Point 4 of 14 – End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag
  6. Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?
  7. Does Toyota Use SPC?
  8. Deming’s Point 3 of 14 – Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality…
  9. Deming’s Point 5 of 14 – Improve Constantly and Forever the System of Production and Service
  10. Deming’s Point 11.b of 14 – Deming versus Drucker
  11. Metrics in Lean – Chart junk in performance boards and presentations
  12. Why “Smart” part numbers should be replaced with keys and property lists
  13. Wrong things ChatGPT says about me
  14. Project Manager Versus Chief Engineer: What’s The Difference?
  15. Deming’s point 1 of 14: Create constancy of purpose…
  16. Why 5S fails
  17. Quality in a Manufacturing System
  18. Why we Need a Quality Department
  19. Orbit charts, and why you should use them
  20. What is an A3?

#greatesthitsof2023, #quality, #VSM, #ValueStreamMap, #deming, #toyota

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LAAqueduct22765.48161.jpg

Apr 27 2022

Flow

In his latest post on AllAboutLean, Christoph Roser compares the flow of materials in a factory with the flow of traffic on roads. About flow, he asks “But what is it?” but stops short of giving an answer. I also wrote many posts about flow without ever bothering to answer that question. It seemed so obvious and self-explanatory that it didn’t require defining but, perhaps, it does.

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FoxAndHedgehog.png

Mar 8 2022

The Fox Knows Many Things, But The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing

The first I heard of the intriguing distinction between foxes and hedgehogs is in Woody Allen’s movie Husbands and Wives, in which Sally, played by Judy Davis, maniacally classifies the people in her life as foxes or hedgehogs.

We often use animal metaphors to categorize personalities, roles, or behaviors. Scrum has given us pigs, who are committed to a project, and chickens, who are merely involved. An individual may be foolishly riding a tiger, be someone else’s lapdog, or have a cat’s nine lives…

Was “the hedgehog and the fox” yet another unproven psychological theory? Sadly, yes. Modern psychologists have indeed built a theoretical house of cards on top of a poetic one-liner from 2700 years ago.

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Sakichi Toyoda precepts

Feb 27 2020

Toyota Precepts and Public Relations

Sam MacPherson

Sam MacPherson started a discussion on LinkedIn about Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda’s 5 Precepts. Sakichi Toyoda died in 1930 and, 5 years later, Kiichiro and Risaburo Toyoda pulled together 5 precepts that he had lived to share with Toyota employees. Sam thinks that these 5 precepts are the key to understanding culture, global business practices, and company Hoshins.

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The 11 handbooks on my shelves

Dec 27 2019

Get Rid of Your Print Handbooks!

Among the dusty tomes Dan Markovitz accused me of hoarding in my office, I found eleven handbooks. They occupy two linear feet of shelf space, and I have a few more in electronic form. The print books have indeed been accumulating dust because they are no longer where I look for information.

For theories, the first stop is Wikipedia; for details on using a software tool, StackOverflow; for changing headlight bulbs in my car, YouTube… The last time I opened a handbook was to check a claim that it covered a particular topic. It didn’t.

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