May 9 2015
“Torero is an Indian leather manufacturing company that is the exclusive global license holder for Cross brand. Here is their story. It aligns with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make In India’ campaign. It has nearly $20 million in annual revenues, employs 4000 workers….”
Source: yourstory.com
May 4 2015
A3s are still being touted as nothing short of a management revolution, but few organizations actually use them for operator work instructions, problem-solving, or hoshin planning. This raises the question of whether the objectives pursued with a paper format may not be easier to achieve with more recent technology. In this post, we consider options for operator work instructions. The other applications of A3s deserve separate treatment.
Apr 24 2015
Contrary to popular opinion, it is not true that only what gets measured gets done. If it were, business, government, and society at large would come to a halt due to the damage done by metrics gamers, and for the lack of the contributions made by people who do not care whether they are measured. Deming is often quoted on this subject, as saying:
As he showed in his “red bead experiments,” his primary concern was about people being rewarded or punished based on random fluctuations in metrics that have nothing to do with their talents or efforts, but there are even more fundamental challenges in an area like people development.
You can measure how much dirt you have shoveled by weighing it, but developing people is different. There is not even a single direction. Some individuals are “hedgehogs,” who know one big thing like heat treatment, while others are “foxes,” who know many things like all the technical and human moving parts of a production line.
There is no metric– or even set of metrics — that can reasonably summarize people development, but it is nonetheless tangible and observable.
Apr 19 2015
Three years ago, a previous post made the case for the key approach to nomenclature, as opposed to the obsolete “smart” numbering systems. In the key approach, the only job of a part number is to be a unique item identifier, through which all relevant information can be retrieved from a database. But you still need to think what items you want to have unique IDs for.
Apr 3 2015
“[…]In 2002, Michael George and Robert Lawrence Jr. published Lean Six Sigma: Combining Six Sigma with Lean Speed, a book that started a revolution that quickly took hold in boardrooms around the globe. Total Quality Control and Six Sigma had always appealed to senior managers, but now it came with the added bonus of increased speed and reduced cost. It was a very welcome addition in the post “dot-com bubble” era and was always too good to be true.[…]”
Source: www.leanblog.org
This is a guest post on Mark Graban’s Lean Blog. Like Mark, I agree with enough of what Erwin says to recommend reading it. Approaches like Lean or Six Sigma emerge out of specific contexts where they are successful, but then their boosters go global cosmic.
Six Sigma started out as a modernization of the tools used to achieve process capability in various segments of the electronics industry, with the goal of making statistical design of experiments a common practice, and the belt system was a way to propagate this body of knowledge. Success in this limited endeavor did not justify selling it as a business panacea.
Lean started out as TPS, which is, to date, the best known way to make cars. TPS has a much broader scope than Six Sigma, encompassing management and technology. It includes human resource management as well as designs for welding lines. The “Lean” label for TPS was a way to allow other car companies to apply it without explicitly referencing Toyota, and to package it for use beyond the car industry. While it’s clearly applicable in many industries, it’s not a panacea either.
What happens when you try to expand an approach beyond its range of applicability is that you drain it of substance in order to make it generic, as has happened to both Lean and Six Sigma, not to mention Lean Six Sigma. All you are left with at that point is homilies.
I have explained my perspective on these matters in the post “MIT article comparing Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, “and related enterprise process improvement methods.”
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
May 14 2015
Where Have The Scatterplots Gone?
What passes for “business analytics” (BI), as advertised by software vendors, is limited to basic and poorly designed charts that fail to show interactions between variables, even though the use of scatterplots and elementary regression is taught to American middle schoolers and to shop floor operators participating in quality circles.
But the software suppliers seem to think that it is beyond the cognitive ability of executives. Technically, scatterplots are not difficult to generate, and there are even techniques to visualize more complex interactions than between pairs of variables, like trendalyzers or 3D scatterplots. And, of course, visualization is only the first step. You usually need other techniques to base any decision on data.
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By Michel Baudin • Data science 4 • Tags: data science, Quality, scatterplot, statistics