Innovation
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Developing your AI Strategy
I realize that I am wading into controversial waters with this topic, but AI is truly the proverbial elephant in the room at this point in time. I am by no means a technophobe. Nor am I the type that cowers in the dark corner fearful that the human apocalypse is drawing near. I believe…
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Productivity isn’t just about labor anymore
Lean often has a bad reputation. I’ve heard countless times that Lean is an excuse for reducing headcount. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lean is a practical means to becoming more efficient, more disciplined, and less wasteful to set your team up for ongoing success. Ultimately, we want to work smarter, not harder…
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Operation: Delayed Permanence
There are several key concepts in the Lean toolbox that are intended to simultaneously constrain materials without sacrificing manufacturing flexibility, such as SMED, Kanban, and Just-in-Time inventory. There are also other powerful Lean strategies that, while lesser known, offer additional advantage in stewarding bloated production costs regarding inventory. No toolkit would truly be complete without…
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Simple Ways to Stimulate Innovation
So, you want to have an organization that demonstrates an eagerness to grow and evolve, with an intense appetite to satisfy any customer’s needs. You want innovation to be “part of the DNA” of the company and are not sure where to start. This is a marathon ambition, but not an unreasonable one, so buckle…
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The PDCA cycle may yet hold some surprises.
We’re all familiar with the Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle (PDCA). It’s the embodiment of the Scientific Method in a simple and memorable form. The PDCA cycle is a democratized process that anyone can use to analyze a problem and test possible solutions without extensive training or certifications. Let’s dive into the PDCA a little…
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Enhancing your Improvements through Teams
As the saying goes, “there is no I in team”. You will also find it true that improvement – sustainable, intense, and profitable improvement – isn’t well suited for just the individual either. Whether continuous improvement (kaizen) or radical step-change improvement (kaikaku), we often make the grand mistake of relying on the genius of one…
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You can do better than just improvement.
Deploying Continuous Improvement is no picnic. It requires commitment, patience, hard work, and a critical shift in the organization’s culture before CI can be sustainable and effective over the long haul. A transition this massive can’t be well-established through a couple of seminars and an inspirational book or two. As I’ve spoken with Continuous Improvement gladiators over the…
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The rich learnings found only in failure…
Much hay is made today that we need to “fail fast, learn, then move forward.” It strikes me as particularly dis-ingenuine however, because the mindsets prominent in most organizations are not fond – or even tolerant – of failure. One could argue that failure is a prerequisite for learning, for without failure we’ve only validated what we…
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Sometimes, starting over is the right solution
Not every problem can be solved incrementally. The uncomfortable reality associated with many leaps of progress is that revolution, not improvement is the key ingredient. If you haven’t been confronted with this truism yet, you likely will eventually. Tried and true only gets us so far in many instances. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a diehard fan of…
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Protecting IP is a high priority. Are you capturing it all?
Intellectual assets come in all shapes and sizes. Traditionally and almost instinctively, we limit the notion of intellectual property (IP) to patents and possibly throw in trademarks, copyrights, or other valuable assets readily afforded governmental protection. However, the truth is that the most prominent, critical, and vulnerable forms of intellectual property are the processes used by your organization every…