The Daily Management Worksheet is a tool to help you update your production board. It has tabs for planning your demand and staffing. This information is automatically added to the production board worksheet to help you manage your day. The production board is the cornerstone of daily management. It is Read more…
Learn about our Lean Terms on PDF. Many of our Lean Dictionary terms (part of The Continuous Improvement Companion) come with a Lean PDF. Download a single Lean PDF file to brush up on a term while waiting for a plane, or get them all to keep a handy Lean Read more…
Conventional wisdom contends that goals are essential for improving team performance. I’ve shared that belief for years, but what if it is wrong? What if goals act to hold back a team’s performance? For low performing teams, I’m convinced that goals do inspire improvement. For those groups, inertia tends to Read more…
This week, we have the first of a two part podcast series on the Six Simple Steps toward a Lean Management Mindset. In these recordings, I interviewed Jay Watson. He recently completed a six week project, and his work highlighted some lessons that he learned over the course of his Read more…
FIFO (First In, First Out) is most commonly known as an accounting term. It simply means that the first inventory into the accounting system is the first that is recorded as used. The opposite, LIFO, or “Last In, First Out” means that the most recently purchased materials are the first Read more…
What’s the difference between a reason and an excuse? The difference is one of intent. When a person has the intention of eliminating the barrier, he has encountered a reason. When a person does not intend to do anything about it, the obstacle is an excuse. For example, imagine that Read more…
In Lean companies, we talk frequently about how batching is bad and flow is good. And yet, nearly every company batches its performance reviews into an annual evaluation. The irony is thick. Those very evaluations—the ones containing 365 days of observations—may critique a Lean leader on how well he was Read more…
Success can seem lucky on the surface, but it seldom is when you dive deeper into it. Case in point. A few years ago I facilitated a kaizen event in a service center. The main goal was to improve lead time. In the course of the event, it became clear Read more…
This week, we have only one link to share. It’s a video of a pretty amazing example of outside the box thinking. Pay attention to the process that the operator uses, and the fixtures that he uses during the transitions. If he can do this, think of what you can Read more…
No, I’m not saying to fake it when you don’t know something. I’m talking about the acronym BLUF. Bottom Line Up Front It’s simple. Lead with what you are trying to accomplish in the meeting so people can stay on track. You are not trying to build suspense, so it Read more…
Kaikaku is revolutionary change. Where kaizen is generally evolutionary in nature, Kaikaku requires radical shifts in thinking. Revolutionary changes tend to be far more challenging in nature and much less common than incremental improvement. Because of the broad, sweeping changes that kaikaku brings, it is generally driven by higher level Read more…
The fishbone diagram (a.k.a. cause and effect diagram, a.k.a. Ishikawa Diagram) is a way of linking the causes of a problem to the observed effect. The diagram groups the causes in categories along the spine. The distinctive shape of the tool gives the fishbone diagram its name. This is one Read more…