The next couple months bring us the two premier manufacturing excellence conferences of the year. The Lean Accounting Summit will be held in Orlando in September, and the AME Annual Conference will be in Dallas in October. Both are expected to sell out, so register soon!

I also encourage you to visit the Evolving Excellence blog.  Our posts have been picked up by several mainstream media outlets, and we have also added several new features such as audio podcasting.

As always we appreciate your support for our mission to spread manufacturing excellence knowledge. Click here for more information on sponsorships.

- Kevin Meyer

• Domestic Manufacturers Force NAM to Take a Stand
  Manufacturing News  - Jul 7, 2006
• Toyota's relationship with vendors is an important link
  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WI - 14 hours ago
• Techniques improve factory efficiency at Industries for the Blind
  Asheville Citizen-Times, NC - Aug 1, 2006
• Living the Dream at Boeing Manufacturing
  Assembly Magazine, IL - Aug 2, 2006
• STEALTHY SUCCESS
  Akron Beacon Journal, OH - Jul 30, 2006
• Recapturing R&D Leadership
  Industry Week - Jul 18, 2006
• Lean: the new buzz concept
  Ferret, Australia - Jul 12, 2006
• Ready For Six Sigma?
  American Machinist, OH - Jul 28, 2006
• Strategy to ensure better profitability
  Hindu, India - Jul 9, 2006
• 500,000 jobs at India's Detroit by 2015
  Rediff, India - Jul 6, 2006
• The seven deadly wastes
  Plant Services, IL - Jul 12, 2006

Visit the Superfactory Events Calendar for the full list of events.

Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise
by Tom Jackson

At the heart of Lean and Six Sigma is the same, unique business operating system: hoshin kanri. It is a method of strategic planning and a tool for managing complex projects, a quality operating system geared to ensuring that organizations faithfully translate the voice of the customer into new products, and a business operating system that ensures reliable profit growth. The true power of hoshin kanri, however, is two-fold -- it is a superior organizational learning method as well as a competitive resource development system. This book explains how you can implement, identify and manage the critical relationships among your markets, design characteristics, production systems, and personnel to satisfy your customers and beat your competition.

More information

Supply and Da Man  
by Joel Makower

How many light bulbs does it take to change a supply chain? In the case of Baxter Healthcare Corp., just three.

When Jenni Cawein, manager of corporate environmental health and safety engineering at the Illinois-based $9.8 billion health-care giant, arrived six years ago, she saw that the company was losing ground on waste. "I asked my boss, 'Who's working with purchasing?' It turned out it was nobody," she says. Cawein set out to build a case for integrating environmental criteria into the company's procurement process.

"I asked what the purchasing department cared about the most," Cawein explains. "I did a lot of research, and of course they care about cost reduction, and had made certain commitments to reduce costs."

Armed with details about the department's goals, Cawein set up a time to address the purchasing staff. At that meeting, she offered an illustrative example involving three fluorescent light bulbs: one cost $1 and was expected to last 2 years; another cost $5 and lasted 8 years; the third cost $2 and lasted 2 years, but used 30 percent less electricity.

"When I ran the actual numbers, including real costs of electricity for all of our facilities around the world, plus labor and disposal costs, and showed them the data, their eyes just opened up," says Cawein. "I showed them that the cheapest bulb would cost us $50 million more than the most efficient bulb."

Cawein's message was clear: greening the supply chain is a strategic, bottom-line issue. Largely as a result of Cawein's light-bulb inspiration, Baxter has embarked on an effort to integrate environmental thinking into every aspect of supply-chain management.

Baxter is not alone in embracing supply-chain environmental management (though its effort may be one of the more ambitious). Companies in a number of sectors have been driving environmental thinking increasingly further upstream -- typically beginning with a handful of their biggest suppliers, and expanding those successes to smaller players.

Read entire article

Who Can Shout Louder?
by Norman Bodek

The reason I am involved in this discussion, and I find it fun and challenging, is that I knew Mr. Taiichi Ohno and Dr. Shigeo Shingo. I was the publisher for both of them. I treasure and respect highly the participation of both these great masters and I don’t believe it is it fair to denigrate the memory of either one of them. They are not here to defend themselves. I gather my perspective from knowing both Mr. Ohno and Dr. Shingo and from many of the Toyota managers that worked with them for many years.

Maybe, just maybe, my illustrious advisories in this discussion are slightly misperceiving the real importance of Dr. Shingo’s participation in the discovery of the Toyota Production System (TPS) / Just-in-time (JIT). Without Dr. Shingo’s ability to write, teach and express his unique knowledge of the Toyota Production System we in the West would probably be at least ten more years behind Toyota. Toyota seems to be very willing to share information with the West today. This was not the case twenty five to thirty years ago. When I first met Mr. Taiichi Ohno in the early 1980’s, I asked him if he had anything in writing for me to see. He said, “Norman, we do not write it down at Toyota because it is always changing.” This confused me, but now in retrospect I know that he was only reluctant to share that which was giving Toyota a competitive position in the World.

Read entire article | Visit the History page