The Evolving Excellence book has just been published, and is now available from Amazon! More information below in the blog and book section.

Superfactory is proud to announce that we will be a sponsor of the first TWI Summit this coming June in Orlando. We are also a sponsor of the 2007 Lean Accounting Summit.

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

- Kevin Meyer

• Founder rings Bell to pull Dell America out of deep well
  The Australian, Australia - 5 hours ago
• More Lean Lessons
  IndustryWeek - Jan 30, 2007
  
• The ABC's Of Overall Equipment Effectiveness
  Manufacturing.net, NJ - Jan 30, 2007
  
• TPM - a survival strategy
  Sunday Times.lk, Sri Lanka - Jan 27, 2007
  
• Airbus cuts costs by learning from auto industry
  MarketWatch - Jan 26, 2007
• How Best Shops Reduce Cycle Times
  American Machinist, OH - Jan 24, 2007
  
• Toyota's Real Secret: Hint, It's Not TPS
  IndustryWeek - Jan 23, 2007
  
• Suit Maker Goes 'Lean' to Keep Jobs in US
  NPR - Jan 23, 2007
• Toyota and Ford may try to establish ties
  Cincinnati Post, OH - Jan 23, 2007
  
• It’s Easy Being Lean
  Business New Jersey, NJ - Jan 22, 2007
  
• DOD learns transport logistics the Toyota way
  FCW.com, VA - Jan 21, 2007
  
• Hospitals look to a leaner, better approach
  St. Louis Post-Dispatch, MO - Jan 17, 2007

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

Evolving Excellence: Thoughts on Lean Enterprise Leadership
by Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell

A 450-page categorized compilation of favorite posts from the Evolving Excellence blog, this book offers different—even outright contradictory—viewpoints that explore various aspects of lean enterprise excellence. In the shared desire to see American manufacturing thrive, authors Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell have poured their knowledge, opinions, and ideas into their blog for the past two years. Sometimes tongue in cheek, usually provocative, occasionally humorous, but always passionate, they point out the failures of companies, organizations, and individuals in the manufacturing industry while also lauding those that understand true excellence.

More information

Reprinted with permission from Target Magazine, the award-winning publication of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.

In a recent survey, AME members said that their hottest topic is working culture. Art, music, and tribal anthropology may characterize ethnic culture, but what about working culture? Anthropologists agree that, like jazz, words inadequately describe any culture to someone not directly experiencing it. We "dig it," or we don't. Much about culture is implicit — sensed — not explicitly discussed. And the culture hardest for us to see and describe is our own, like that old conundrum: Does a fish see the water it swims in?

Despite the caveats, an emerging definition of working culture is, "How we do things around here." It is the collective behavior of people using common habits, words, goals, systems, and symbols; and interwoven with processes, technologies, significant events, training — and a slew of other stuff that no one can explicitly gather in mind at once. All this melds and clashes to form our present working culture.

In addition, different individuals bring to the workplace their own uniqueness, ethnic culture, and life experience. From a managerial view, the quickest, easiest way to impose order on this mess is by command- and-control. Hierarchies form naturally, both in nature and in human society. Children on a playground establish a pecking order pretty fast.

If work isn't complex, command-and-control gets it done. It worked well in close-formation warfare. Generals with a "commanding view" of a battlefield ordered into formation troops who abided by that famous line from Rudyard Kipling, "Ours is not to question why; ours is but to do or die."

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Discovering the Lean Supply Chain: Transforming Suppliers into Powerful Lean Differentiators
by Robert Hawkey, Lean Horizons Consulting

Mention the phrase “strategic sourcing” and a number of thoughts, concepts and disciplines come to mind including supplier selection strategies, supplier performance improvement, purchased price reductions and streamlined buyer-supplier transactions management. While each of the preceding tactics can play an important role in supply chain optimization, they all fail to capture one of the single biggest advantages supply chain operations confer on any manufacturer by providing a tailor-made vehicle for driving Lean outside of the organization’s four walls and upstream into the supplier community. By using supply chain management as a driver of enterprise-wide Lean transformation, savvy manufacturers can successfully capitalize on the next strategic phase of supplier management and dramatically enhance the use of Lean as a true competitive weapon.

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