May 22 2018
Sam MacPherson just posted the following Toyota sign on LinkedIn:
As usual with bilingual Toyota sign, the English is not great and the translation not perfectly accurate. With its tens of thousands of American employees, you might expect Toyota to use writers who know better than to mix nouns like “Teamwork” and a sentence like “We love Toyota” as items in the same list.
May 10 2018
“At its core, lean is not about takt time, throughput, push, pull, A3s, or even Kaizen. These are the tools or byproducts of thoughtful management. Lean, at its heart, is about thoughtful management of the business, of the teams, and of ourselves.”
Sourced from The Lean Post
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
According to this author, any company with “thoughtful management” is lean. He must, therefore, conclude that Alphabet/Google is lean today, and that so were HP under Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the 1960s and GM under Alfred P. Sloan in the 1920s. Sloan, Hewlett, and Packard all were thoughtful managers who conceived and implemented systems that were regarded as models for decades but I have never heard it claimed that they made Google, HP, or GM “lean.” Taken this broadly, the term loses all meaning.
May 9 2018
“Japanese Production Techniques, Made In America. Last month I had the opportunity to visit the Toyota facto y in Georgetown, Kentucky, which is the largest vehicle assembly plant in Toyota’s global production network. I had last visited Georgetown 15 years ago, and the site has grown considerably since then. At 8.1 million square feet, it is the largest vehicle assembly plant in Toyota’s global production network. Not only can it produce 550,000 vehicles per year, it can make more than 600,000 engines annually.”
Sourced from Forbes
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Besides the above picture and the lead paragraph, there is essentially nothing in this article that couldn’t have been written without setting foot in the plant, which is disappointing from a publication like Forbes. For informative reports on factory tours, see Christoph Roser’s Grand Tour of Japanese Automotive Factories.
May 5 2018
On September 7, 2017, France2’s Envoyé Spécial (“Special Correspondent”) had a feature about a suicide epidemic among nurses at French public hospitals and blamed it on the adoption of management practices from the private sector, and singled out “Lean Management” as a method from the car industry that resulted in treating patients like cars and nurses like assembly line workers. It went on to explain that it was Ford’s system “from the 1930s,” dressed up by Toyota with a few Japanese words.
Besides the reporters’ inability to get basic facts — Ford’s system is not from the 1930s and Toyota’s is not a copy of it — I don’t recognize here any of the approaches I have heard from colleagues involved in health care, like Mark Graban, Pascal Dennis, or Katie Anderson, and it doesn’t match my experience as a patient in a healthcare network that has had an active Lean program for four years. Mostly, what I have noticed is less waiting when I show up for appointments, friendlier staff, and enhanced online services, including communications with doctors.
May 4 2018
“INTERVIEW – In this Dutch university (Avans), lean is not only taught in the classroom. A3s are now replacing the writing of a thesis as the final assignment students are asked to complete. […] This 20-week project is part of the last year’s workload. The company comes up with a problem (based on their needs) that the student will be asked to solve, and we at Avans gauge whether there is enough depth to the problem for it to qualify as a final project. […] The standard tool we use to document the learning and map the project is the A3 methodology. Starting this year, students will no longer be required to write a thesis. The A3 will take its place.”
Sourced through Planet Lean
Michel Baudin‘s comments: This interview raises the questions of whether it is a good idea to replace theses with A3s, and for a university to align itself with Lean.
First, Avans University is not a small institution: it has three campuses in the Netherlands, 30,000 students, and a 200-year history. That it’s doing away with the requirement of a 40-page final report in its graduation requirements is no small matter.
Van der Werk’s rationale for it is that “[these] reports are not something that students will ever be asked to produce on the job.” Be that as it may, does it necessarily follow that they should be replaced by A3s as graduation requirements?
May 23 2018
Using Data Science To Improve Manufacturing
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 this time 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.
This is not just about reaping tangible benefits today rather than hypothetical ones in the future but also about acquiring skills needed to design new plants and production lines 5 years from now. These publications endow technology with a power to drive innovation that it doesn’t have. It is only a means for people to innovate. Their ability to do so hinges on their mastery of the technology, which is acquired by using it in continuous improvement.
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By Michel Baudin • Data science • 7 • Tags: analytics, Data munging, data science, Data wrangling, Machine Learnin, Visualization