One of the main hindrances for proper lean manufacturing is, in my view, management by numbers. While few managers actively do management by numbers, a quantitative measurement is still often preferred. The problem is if you can measure the cost but not the benefits of something…which often happens in lean manufacturing. Now let me rant a bit…
Leadership
Adding Another Axis to the Qualification Matrix—Products
In my last two posts I talked about the qualification matrix, where you match the skills of your people to the skills needed for your business. This can be expanded with another axis, as for example the skills needed for certain products. This connects your people to your products through skills. It is also more useful for products where a single person assembles an entire product.
How to Use a Qualification Matrix
In my last post, I described how to build a qualification matrix (also skill matrix, competence matrix, or Q-Matrix). In this post I will go into more detail on how to use a qualification matrix. By itself, the qualification matrix is a pretty simple but useful tool. This post will help you to get the most out of it.
This is NOT Lean: Lean Staffing
In this post I would like to talk about another term that claims to be lean: lean staffing. It is NOT lean! It is an abomination. It is pretty much the opposite of what, in my opinion, lean stands for. It is a complete lack of respect for humanity. Let me explain you what it is, why it is terrible, and how to prevent this. Note that this post may include a rant here and there.
How to Look Good at the Cost of Your Successor (Please Don’t!)–Part 3
This is the last of my three posts on how to benefit at the cost of your successor. And again, please don’t. This is more of a warning on how to damage the plant for the benefit of the manager. And again, I hope rather than someone using this as a to-do list, someone uses it to see dangers. This last post looks at the worst “trick” of them all, burning the goodwill of your employees for a quick buck. It also looks at the one easiest to see, selling the plant and renting it back.
How to Look Good at the Cost of Your Successor (Please Don’t!)–Part 2
This is the second post in this short three-post series on how to look good while driving the plant into the ground. Again, the following is intended more of a warning on how NOT to do it, even though I fear some may use it as a checklist. My hope is that even more see the signs and can stop it, or at least not reward the person in question for this type of skullduggery. I will also talk briefly about how to recognize and counteract this type of behavior for the long-term health and success of your plant.
How to Look Good at the Cost of Your Successor (Please Don’t!)–Part 1
This post series will be an unusual one. I will tell you how to look good in manufacturing at the cost of your successor. Of course, I do NOT want you to do that. Not only will there be no improvement, but instead the plant will be worse in the long run at the cost of a short-term benefit. This is a somewhat sarcastic post on the dirty tricks you can use to look good, while at the same time driving your (future) plant into the ground. The responsible managers of course will be somewhere else before the inevitable happens. Even though the approaches below are bad for the plant, I am sure some managers will use this as a checklist. But I hope that even more people will see it as a list of warnings for bad managers.
Where to Start Your Kaizen?
To become lean, you need to improve your factory. Continuous improvement (kaizen) consists of many smaller and/or larger improvements. However, often the first challenge is where to start this improvement. Let me dig deeper into the possibilities and challenges of picking improvement projects, with a particular focus on systems that have multiple independent production lines, which makes everything trickier.