May 10 2018

Mapping a Reading List to Lean | Jim Benson | The Lean Post

“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.

Continue reading…

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May 9 2018

Inside Toyota’s Giant Kentucky Factory | Willy Shih | Forbes

Operator Melissa George on raku-raku seat

“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.

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May 5 2018

French TV Show Blames Nurse Suicides On “Lean Management” In Hospitals

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.

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May 4 2018

These students are replacing theses with A3s | H. van der Werk | Planet Lean

“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.

A3s versus Reports

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?

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Apr 18 2018

This blog is secure

In order to protect my visitors’ data, increase loading speed, and move up the ranks on Google, I recently converted this blog from an unsecured http://… site to a secure https://… site. What happened since, however, is not exactly as expected.

The site does not load any faster, the number of daily visitors has been cut by a factor of three, and some readers have told me that they are getting warnings from Google when connecting.

According to the company that hosts my blog and sold me my security certificate, the site is clean. To make sure it stays that way, I have also beefed up its security with tools from WordPress.

According to the hosting company, it may take four to six weeks for Google to notice that the site is safe and stop emitting the warnings.

#BlogSecurity

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Apr 6 2018

Visit to Mitsubishi Motors’ Okazaki Plant | Christoph Roser | AllAboutLean

Mitsubishi founder Yataro Iwasaki

“Mitsubishi Motors is the oldest of the major car companies in Japan, established 1917. It is also one of the smaller ones in Japan, with only slightly more than 1 million vehicles produced in 2016. In January 2018, I had the chance to visit their Okazaki plant near Nagoya. I also visited the Mitsubishi Fuso plant in Kawasaki and one of its suppliers, although that is technically another company. Let me give you the gist of the Mitsubishi Motors Plant Okazaki. […] As for corporate responsibility, Mitsubishi Motors does not have a good reputation. There were multiple scandals, dating back to 1970, where they covered up defects and manipulated their fuel efficiency. Their (former) president, Kawasoe, along with other managers was arrested and convicted. Mitsubishi Motors suffered and retreated. […] Nowadays Mitsubishi Motors is controlled by Nissan (the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance).”

Sourced from AllAboutLean

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Another report from Christoph Roser’s grand tour of Japanese car plants, and a good remedy for anyone who still believes there is a “Japanese way” to manufacture. Just in the car industry, there are many players: Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru,… and they are all different. Just check out Christoph’s other reports.

For me, one takeaway from this report is that you can retrofit self-driving technology to golf carts and use them to pull trains of part carts on a car assembly floor.

Part delivery train pulled by self-driving golf cart

#JapaneseCarPlant, #MitsubishiMotors

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