Tag: Manufacturing

Eight years ago today, I published a piece originally on LinkedIn as part of their "Influencers" series: Rather than Blaming Employees, Managers Must Take Responsibility...

Today's episode of "My Favorite Mistake" is another one that Lean practitioners will especially like. My guest, Sabrina Moon, talks about how she (unfortunately) learned...

For Episode #371, we bring the discussion back to Lean Manufacturing applications, as our guest is Marc Lushington-Murray. He currently lives in the Fort...

My guest for Episode #366 is Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative. We talk about "reshoring," in general, and why that's such an...

Joining me for Episode #364 is a returning guest, Mitch Cahn, the president of Unionwear, a Newark-based company. Back in Episode #234, we talked...

It's great to see examples of manufacturing companies being flexible and adaptive in these challenging times. Lean methods are often providing a huge boost...

Back in 2006, I wrote my first blog post about the unfortunate use of "assembly line" to mean "bad quality." The context there was...

My guest for Episode 311 is Jess Orr, a continuous improvement practitioner at WestRock, a large paper and packaging company, where she helps plants foster a culture of continuous improvement and employee engagement. \Her experience includes working directly for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky. She is particularly passionate about sharing best practices across industries, which motivated her to found Yokoten Learning. In today's episode, we talk about her path from Six Sigma Black Belt to a Lean-thinking engineer at Toyota. How did she progress from solving problems herself to developing others? We'll talk about a blog post that she wrote for this blog earlier this year, Lean and ROI, leadership and culture, and much more. What is it like working outside of Toyota again? I hope you enjoy the discussion.

I started my career in manufacturing, so that's just one reason I'm interested in the topics of offshoring (sending manufacturing work overseas) and what's now called "reshoring," or bringing jobs and factories back to the U.S. Somebody at A.T. Kearney sent me a link to their recent report on reshoring, with the headline: Reshoring in Reverse Again US manufacturers are not exactly coming back in droves. In fact, the 2018 Reshoring Index shows that imports from traditional offshoring countries are at a record high. When you learn to look at data and workplace metrics through the "Process Behavior Chart" methodology, you learn to be skeptical of text descriptions like "a record high." Does "a record high" mean that the data point is statistically meaningful? Not always.

Mark's Note: Today's post is the first guest post by Jess Orr, who you might remember from the webinars that she did for KaiNexus. I hope you enjoy the post... As a continuous improvement practitioner, I recently faced a challenge that seemed nearly insurmountable.

Not all Japanese companies are the same. "Lean isn't easy" if you're a Japanese company. Toyota has created something special, since "Toyota culture" is not exactly the same as "Japanese culture." The WSJ says the "model is cracking." Do scandals involving quality and ethical lapses involving companies including those and Nissan tarnish Lean and the Toyota Production System? No. That's as silly as thinking the Wells Fargo banking scandal tarnishes Silicon Valley (although the Valley does enough to tarnish itself).

Lean can be very fragile. History shows that Lean can fall apart even in an organization that is years into a "Lean journey" with strong CEO involvement. How is this possible? If often happens when a new CEO is brought in from the outside. In the case of the manufacturing company, Wiremold, it happened when they were acquired by a French company, Legrand. As an aside, the team that coined the term "Lean" almost used the term "fragile," as I blogged about here. Back in 2007, Bob Emiliani joined me for Episode #30 of the podcast. As we revisit the podcast and the new transcript I had made, what are the lessons for manufacturers or hospitals? What's the risk that's created when new leadership takes over?