Tag: Management
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Kanban – Leveraging the Double-Edged Sword
While Kanban has advantages, it’s definitely a double-edged sword. It can reduce electronic transactions, but may increase material handling. Reduced transactions decrease the risk of outage, but kanban cards frequently get misplaced. It may minimize hardware and software investment, but necessitate special-purpose containers. Adding insult to injury, kanbans can even increase inventory. To minimize the…
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The Most Useful Quality Book of All Time?
Brilliance is often sold short. As a case in point, consider the book “World Class Quality” by Keki Bhote (especially the 2nd edition!). While many know about Six Sigma improvement tools, far fewer are aware of the Shainin techniques that this book covers. In contrast to Six Sigma’s cumbersome and underachieving nature, Shainin techniques are…
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George Costanza and the Art of Communication
In the television program “Seinfeld”, there was a screw-up named George Costanza who always snatched defeat from assured victory. In one episode, this character changed his luck by doing the exact opposite of his natural inclinations for every single decision set before him. Although this “George Costanza Method” was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, ideas from…
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Assembly Lines – Count the Cost!
In many high-mix-medium-volume (HMMV) businesses, assembly lines are initiated with a desire to achieve the efficiency of high-volume production while preserving the ability to customize to customer need. However, due to a lack of homework, dreams of efficiency often degenerate into a nightmare of chaos. Product gets stranded, work in process piles up, employees play…
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Mind the Gap! – Anatomy of a Great Work Instruction
On top of being the world’s first subway, the London Underground (aka “The Tube”) also ushered in several innovations in work instructions: Clarity – In the process of developing the Underground map, its developers realized that geographical accuracy would come at the expense of user comprehension. As a result, they ditched accuracy in favor of…
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Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)… Could it stand a diet?
Despite the fact that overall equipment effectiveness CAN be a good measurement, the way it’s generally applied entails a LOT of data collection. Consider a few items required by the frequently-used OEE data collection sheet that’s shown: In addition to distracting the workforce from serving the product, there are problems like: An alternative? Simplifying OEE:…
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The best 5S you’ll ever see… It might surprise you!
In the 1980’s, there was a hit song called “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places” that told the story of a man looking for a long-term relationship in bars. By the singer’s own account, he ultimately found a mate even though he had failed many times before. Before dismissing this moral out of…
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The purpose of a business?
It’s widely believed that the purpose of a business is to make a profit, but does this idea confuse means and ends? Would it be more accurate and helpful to say that a business’s purpose is existence and profit is one means (among many) that ensures this? Thinking of the issue this way would help…
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Continuous Improvement (CI) Hack: Don’t Follow the Waste. Follow the Time!
As opposed to a direct approach, dealing with a problem indirectly is often better. For example, politics has the time-honored rule of “Follow the Money”. In other words, you can try to understand political chaos by analyzing it directly, but money trails unravel the behavior of politicians in a simpler way. Continuous Improvement (CI) is…
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Classical Management – What To Do?
From Deming on, many have pointed out the many problems associated with classical management. Far fewer (zero?) have proposed an alternative that entices decision-makers. And Bob Emiliani (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-emiliani-660a72170/) has identified the reason: Management isn’t interested in messing with a status quo that confers them power and privilege! When you think about it, asking the powerful…