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The Superfactory Newsletter is published monthly to over 50,000 subscribers. Inside Superfactory About -
Articles  Lean Assessment 40 criteria assessing people, leadership, infrastructure, and lean tools. More Information  PowerPoint Presentations Lean Manufacturing Lean Overview - 3P - 5S - Jidoka - Kaizen - Value Streams - Visual Factory - Pull - JIT - Kanban - Quick Changeover - Cellular Manufacturing - Standard Work - Theory of Constraints - TPM - TWI Lean Enterprise Quality Business Safety  DVD Videos Training and information videos on a wide variety of lean manufacturing topics. Life in a Workcell - Batchin' - What Lean Means - Kaizen Blitz - Shigeo Shingo - Lean Accounting - ESD - 5S - Quick and Easy Kaizen - Customer Satisfaction - Work Teams - Velocity at Dell - Strategic Planning  Factory Toolbox Over 500 forms, procedure templates, and tools for download. Lean Toolkit - Procedures Toolkit - Quality Toolkit - Tools and Forms Toolkit - Engineering Toolkit - Materials Toolkit - Safety Toolkit - HR Toolkit - Six Sigma Toolkit - Finance Tookit Sponsors
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Volume 10 Issue 1 | January 2009 | www.superfactory.com |
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From the Editor
The last several months have been tough for many manufacturers, and it looks like the next few, at least, will be difficult as well. Now's the time to invest your knowledge resources. You know you're popular when you suffer from incessant hacker attacks, and that has happened to the Superfactory website recently. So much so that we've had to accelerate a planned redesign, which went live at the end of December. Check out the new Superfactory website. And finally, we succumbed to the Twitter phenom and joined that microblogging system with over four million users. You can join us as well as several other lean - Kevin Meyer |
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Manufacturing Excellence NewsStories of interest to the lean community.
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In the BlogJoin over 5,000 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:
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Upcoming Events
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Featured Book
By John Shook Managing to Learn by Toyota veteran John Shook, reveals the thinking underlying the vital A3 management process at the heart of lean management and lean leadership. Constructed as a dialogue between a manager and his boss, the book explains how A3 thinking helps managers and executives identify, frame, and then act on problems and challenges. |
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Featured Article
By Richard Schonberger Lean management doesn’t resonate in marketing and sales. Nor does it among boards, senior executives and investors. Reasons relate to where lean tends to do most of its work - in operations - and its usual presentation as an attack on waste. Obscured are its much greater potential in the distribution pipelines and its strong customer focus. What lean does, above all else, is provide quick, flexible response to customer demand. But muddling that message are perverse accounting practices that discourage quick delivery well matched to customer usage. Marketing’s valued role is in collaborative lean planning, first within the company and then taken to customers in the external value chain. Getting Lean There are various ways to get slim and justifications for doing so. The lean community tells us the way to do it is to cut waste. Moreover, in marketing’s view, it should stay there. From its perspective, being slim suggests meager supplies of product to sell and a skimpy budget for selling them. Further, we are told that reducing waste is not only lean’s methodology, but also its objective. The reasoning sounds circular: Lean reduces wastes in order to reduce waste. To gain traction, lean needs to present itself broadly and correctly. Its mandate, providing flexibly quick response, translates into fewer back orders, higher availability of what’s selling and fewer gluts of unpopular product models. Lean’s customer focus once was well understood. When its basics were unveiled in the early 1980s, lean (formerly just-in-time) quickly became the rage in Western industry. With JIT, Japan had shown an amazing ability to mop up via speed, flexibility and quality - and at a lower cost. Why the shift towards lean as an attack on waste? Three reasons: Waste reduction is easily taught, lends itself to measurement and does lead to quicker response. But so do other methods, among them simplifying product designs; culling lesser, capacity-gobbling products, components, suppliers and customers; and collaborating up and down the value chain. But all methods are hampered by how conventional accounting distorts decision-making. Lean Costing/Pricing Accounting treats inventory as an asset. And it is - if the right product at the right time, and if processed and delivered with dispatch. Under lean, inventory reduction occurs only as causes of long, problematic lead times and resolved so that right items and quantities can flow both smoothly and quickly. |
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Featured Blog Post
Japan Kaikaku Experience - The Summary I've received several requests to provide all of the links to posts on my recent Japan trip on one page, so here they are. I still have a few more potential "lessons" posts bouncing around in my head, and if they see the light of day I'll add them to this page as well. Factory Tour Reports
Lessons From Japan
Implementing the Lessons |
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Welcome to the Superfactory Newsletter!
Managing to Learn
The Skinny on Lean Management