The “Theory of Constraints” is the management philosophy of Eliyahu M. Goldratt. He introduced it in his 1984 book, The Goal. The overall premise is that a system can only produce as fast as the slowest step. The throughput of the system, therefore, can be improved with a focused effort Read more…
Major changes are often hard to implement all at once. It may be because the technology or idea is not fully proven, or it may be a lack of resources in getting the bugs worked out. There may also be substantial risk if there is a mistake in the planning Read more…
Most continuous improvement efforts, either directly or indirectly, are centered on improving flow. Flow is the condition where work moves from one process to the next without stopping. Improving flow means taking out all the efficiencies that keep that continuous movement smooth and direct. When flow doesn’t exist, it is Read more…
Queue time is a very specific form of waiting, one of the traditional seven wastes. It occurs when a person or item is in line behind something else and is waiting for the same resource. Queue time occurs in two basic flavors. There is the time spent by the customer Read more…
Balancing relationships and the requirements of your job can feel like you are walking a tightrope. One of the most challenging balancing acts comes when you have a coworker who is constantly passing on the same problem to you over and over. You don’t want to feel like you are Read more…
Gap analysis is the art of identifying where performance or capability falls short of needs, and of coming up with an effective way of addressing that gap. That gap is also occasionally referred to as the “delta”. That delta comes in one of two forms. The first is that there Read more…
SWAG is an acronym, likely originating in the US Army, for “scientific wild-ass guess”. It is used to describe a hypothesis or decision that is based on a small amount of factual evidence, but nowhere near enough to have certainty. Any organization with a fast pace of change, at some Read more…
Sometime in the last few days, we passed the quarter million video views mark on YouTube. Far from the numbers the typical kitty playing with yarn gets, but for a small business, we think it is pretty respectable. And much appreciated. The funny thing is that nothing really changed between Read more…
One of the jobs of a leader in a Lean environment is to push teams to embrace a continuous improvement culture. The often entails asking the team to try to implement one of the Lean tools in a work area. On occasion, the tool they the boss recommends is not Read more…
The term stability is the tendency of something to keep its current state. The opposite of stability is Lean operations is variation, or the state of things fluctuating wildly, or drifting away from normal. Stable processes tend to not only produce high quality outputs, but also do it in a Read more…
Every continuous improvement project should start with data collection. Unfortunately, when that data is collected with a notion of how the results should look, not surprisingly, the results often come out as they are expected to. It is easy to introduce bias into a data collection effort, if you are Read more…
Many people are familiar with the concept of one-touch exchange of dies, an offshoot of SMED. The basically means that there should be a simple, fluid motion to replace dies and fixtures in order to minimize setup time. The concept is present in the real world as well. Consider the Read more…