In my last post I started a sarcastic post on how to bring your organization to a standstill… not because I want that, but so you can see what NOT to do to in order to improve your organization. Many of the ideas are based on the US Simple Sabotage Field Manual and the Total Resistance: Swiss Army Guide to Guerilla Warfare and Underground Instructions, but adapted to a modern factory environment. Below I continue the list of ideas for how to screw up your company. I’m sure you have seen some of them in action, even though they were not intended that way. Again: This is for you to see what NOT to do. Please enjoy!
Leadership
How to Grind Your Organization to a Standstill—Part 1
I write a lot of posts explaining what to do to improve your organization. But occasionally I write a (sarcastic!) explanation on how to make everything worse. Of course, I don’t want to make your organization worse. However, it is valuable to see what makes things worse, and in turn how to avoid exactly these things so as NOT to make it worse. Maybe—and I am optimistic here—maybe even try to do the opposite and make it better? Anyway, let’s learn how (not?) to screw up an organization…
On the Importance of Deep Dives
To manage your shop floor, or maybe even improve it, you need to understand it. Yet, the complexity of modern manufacturing makes it all but impossible to truly understand the system and all its aspects and correlations, and the whole mess that we call “unintended consequences.” Hence, you need occasional deep dives in addition to the big-picture view. In this blog post, I will talk more about deep dives. Let’s… ahem… go diving…
Why Is So Important for Managers to Listen!
In lean, there is a lot of talk about “learning to see,” with the goal of better understanding the shop floor. This is, of course, important. However, another important aspect is listening, both on the shop floor and elsewhere. This blog post goes deeper into why and how to listen to the shop floor, or generally the gemba.
Why Operators Need to Measure Their Own Data!
The goal is to have everything relevant easily visible on the shop floor. Ideally, this is through the design of the shop floor as part of visual management. But a lot of other information is hard to see directly and can be shown best through data. Every well-managed shop floor has their different dashboards and other data sheets with information. This blog post focuses on why you should have your operators write down this data by hand. Lets have a look…
Kaizen Through Growing Your People
As mentioned in my last post, continuous improvement (kaizen) is done through people, ideally close to the shop floor. You should always look for people to develop and grow, as they in turn nurture your continuous improvement. While it is really hard to give specific recommendations that apply to everybody, let me muse a bit on the topic.
Who Does Kaizen?
One core aspect of lean manufacturing is continuous improvement, or kaizen in Japanese. This concept emphasizes ongoing, incremental enhancements to processes, products, and services. Yet, there are commonly differences between how Toyota does kaizen and how the rest of the world does kaizen. These mostly relate to who does most of the kaizen activities. In Western companies, kaizen is usually driven by management. At Toyota, most of the improvement originates from and is handled on the shop floor. Let me explain…
A Common Mistake in Doing Lean: Skipping the Details!
Lean manufacturing is a great set of philosophies and tools to improve your production system, or for that matter any kind of operational system. Yet, many supposed lean implementations fail. One of the various reasons for failure of a lean project is a lack of attention to detail. Let me explain: