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• Featured Book - Chain Reaction
• Article - Lean Manufacturing: Are You Ready?
• Featured Blog Post - What Is Your Training Threshold?

The next few weeks bring us two of the best lean manufacturing conferences of the year.

In late September we have the Lean Accounting Summit in Orlando, which is very close to selling out so register now. Then in late October we have the AME Annual Conference in Chicago, the largest lean manufacturing conference in the world. I will be at both events, and hope to see you there!

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

- Kevin Meyer

• A Lean Approach to Production Planning
  IndustryWeek - Sep 11, 2007
  
• To survive and thrive in these days of globalization
  Kansas City Star, MO - Sep 10, 2007
  
• Chrysler signals drive by hiring Toyota executive
  Moneyweb, South Africa - Sep 7, 2007
  
• How to Make an Office Lean
  IndustryWeek - Sep 4, 2007
  
• Toyota’s green drive to the top
  Times Online, UK - Sep 1, 2007
  
• ‘Lean’ governance
  Sify, India - Sep 13, 2007
  
• Steel buyers still want quality products delivered on time
  Purchasing.com, MA - Sep 13, 2007
  
• How Boeing Got Going
  TIME - Aug 30, 2007
  
• Boost productivity with lean software development
  ComputerWeekly.com, UK - Aug 24, 2007
  
• To maximize improvement opportunities, we need human andons
  Reliable Plant Magazine, OK - Aug 22, 2007
  
• Get competitive thinking lean
  Cape Business News, South Africa - Aug 21, 2007
  
• Jetsetter engineers a future for Weir
  Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom - Aug 25, 2007
  

Join the other 2,500 readers who get their daily dose of blunt manufacturing reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog!

Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:

• SAP and Whirlpool... Aha! - Now we understand what drove Whirlpool to fire... and then rehire... and retrain.
• Outsourcing's Carbon Footprint - Environmentalists can teach outsourcing companies something about total cost.
• The Entropy of Lean - Lean and the second law of thermodynamics.
• Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? - Learning how to... learn.
• The Hyper Evolving Organization - What Hillary Clinton's campaign can teach us about organizations.
• The Glories of Indian Auto ERP - Yes, even Indian auto companies use ERP... sort of.
• McKinsey Hollows Out Lego - A consulting wunderkind outsources the core, and learns a lesson.
• People, Diapers, and Kegs - Forgetting the knowledge we arrive with.
• Chinese Best Practices - Chinese manufacturing is evolving to create unique global best practices.

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

  Chain Reaction: How Today's Best Companies
  Manage Their Supply Chains
  by Robert Malone

The rise of Wal-Mart, Dell, IKEA, IBM, UPS, and FedEx has changed the way consumers and businesses function in America. This book takes a look at the successes of these companies and shows how these very different businesses have all come to the same basic plan, leading them to become dominant in their industry. Malone argues that success in business is based upon an aggressive and intelligent supply chain strategy. He contends that the most effective business logistics today allow a business to manufacture, distribute, and sell on demand, and he shows in detail how superpower companies have mastered the strategy. This is a change from the historical “push” strategy – manufacturing and marketing as many products as possible and pushing them to the wholesaler, retailer and consumer to a “pull” strategy. This new demand-driven and synchronized supply chain is tailored for the new and aggressive business practice of the future.

More Information

Lean Manufacturing: Are You Ready?
by James Cavalluzzi

“LEAN MANUFACTURING”, you hear it everywhere, everyday, you can’t escape it, but what is it? We all have our ideas, however, if you haven’t been formally trained or deeply involved, odds are, you’re thinking only of the cost savings side. Think back when ISO became all the rage. The basic understanding was that we would hire a quality engineer, put some standards and checklists in place, and magically, all our problems would be solved. In a short amount of time and with a reasonably small budget; our defects would vanish, our lead times and inventories would shrink, the customers would beat a path to our doors, and our profits would soar. Company after company embraced the concept, and a considerable percentage of those companies soon abandoned it as too costly and time consuming when compared to the immediate financial returns.

Now, as we are deeply entrenched in the lean manufacturing era, most small to medium businesses are of the same mindset. Just as we saw company after company abandon the ISO certification process because it was too time consuming, costly and wasn’t bringing those throngs of customers to our doorsteps, so too are many companies abandoning, or in many cases, taking only a random or unsystematic approach to this concept.

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What Is Your Training Threshold?
by Craig Woll

I think we all know what the Law of Diminishing Returns is but for the sake of clarity I’ve included the wise words of Wikipedia to improve our understanding.

Definition from Wikipedia:

“According to this relationship, in a production system with fixed and variable inputs (say factory size and labor), beyond some point, each additional unit of variable input yields less and less additional output.”

Example from Wikipedia:

“Suppose that one kilogram (kg) of seed applied to a plot of land of a fixed size produces one ton of harvestable crop. You might expect that an additional kilogram of seed would produce an additional ton of output. However, if there are diminishing marginal returns, that additional kilogram will produce less than one additional ton of harvestable crop (on the same land, during the same growing season, and with nothing else but the amount of seeds planted changing). For example, the second kilogram of seed may only produce a half ton of extra output. Diminishing marginal returns also implies that a third kilogram of seed will produce an additional crop that is even less than a half ton of additional output. Assume that it is one quarter of a ton.”

So to create an analogy from the example above let us assume that each ton of seed is equivalent to 30 minutes of training and the plot of land is our brain. It is easy to speculate that if 30 minutes of training on a task leads to a 10% increase in knowledge then 60 minutes of training on a task will lead to a 20% increase in knowledge in the same training session. If no other variables change beyond the length of the training session, it is probably more likely that there will only be a 15% total increase in knowledge. If you increase the training session length by an additional 30 minutes you may only increase the total knowledge transfer to 17% and so on.

Before somebody quotes me as saying that you can only get a 17% increase in knowledge in 90 minutes, it is important to remember that we are just building from the original Wikipedia example in order to clarify a key principle. That principle is that training follows the Law of Diminishing Returns.

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