Improvement
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Leveraging Visual Management Properly
There is perhaps no greater innovation in the continuous improvement world than visual management. Visual management is always found at the core of spectacular employee engagement and is a proven means of empowering our workforce to accomplish the impossible. Allow me to explain. During Toyota’s darkest hours there was a brilliant epiphany; engage the entire workforce, knowing…
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Avoiding the Rework Quality Trap
No matter our functions or our procedures in our work, we can reduce our daily burden while simultaneously increasing our productivity if would only avoid the dangers of rework. It sounds like magic, but the secret is in learning to work smarter rather than harder. Rework is that one nuisance characteristic that all processes seem doomed to…
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Selecting Solutions with Confidence
The spice of life (for us engineers, anyhow) is being able to successfully overcome obstacles and see them shrink away in our rear-view mirror. New challenges are thrown our way every day. So how do you systematically organize, prioritize, and resolve these pesky problems in a collaborative manner? What tools are in your own personal toolbox for this…
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Covering your Quality Bases
I’ve had the privilege of seeing behind the curtain in many different businesses from a broad range of industries. No business I’ve seen has had the luxury of shirking quality. It’s an essential part of every operation. However, an organization’s view of quality manifests itself in the ways they attempt to control it. Let’s explore the different views…
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What can Lean Thinking do for You?
Sometimes we believe that the improvement process is more of a black art, like voodoo, than a real definable process. Lean Thinking, popularized in the 80’s and beyond by such visionaries as James Womack, Art Byrne, Mike Rother and others is more of a hocus pocus routine that seems to work for some but not…
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Once and Done Doesn’t Work
Often we can fall into the trap of believing that a process is “fixed” once we’ve applied our continuous improvement magic. Simply perform a kaizen or post some data trends, and now the problem is resolved. If Toyota taught us anything it is that the act of improvement can never stop, stall, or relent. If…