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From the Editor

Welcome to the Superfactory Newsletter!

In these tough economic times organizations and individuals are turning to online learning to hone their skills without incurring travel or consultant expenses. As part of our commitment to finding better ways to make things better we will introduce Gemba Academy, a revolutionary new channel where HD quality web 2.0 meets lean learning, in March 2009. Preview and learn more about Gemba Academy.

FSG|KnowledgeMedia, the parent of Superfactory, is also pleased to introduce a new series of "morning news" websites with the ".am" suffix. Instead of visiting a variety of different sites each morning to get an update on general news, topic news, and your favorite blogs, now you can visit one dynamically-updated site for everything. Take a look at lean.am, manufacturing.am, engineering.am, quality.am, safety.am, supplychain.am, and healthcare.am. There are mobile versions as well, just add a "/m" to the end.

Finally, our favorite research historian, Shingo Prize winning Bob Emiliani, tells us the forgotten story of Frank Wollard's contributions to lean in this month's featured article.

- Kevin Meyer

Manufacturing Excellence News

Stories of interest to the lean community.

• A Simple Lesson From Buffett
  Motley Fool - 5 hours ago
• Just In Time -- A Breath of Hot Air
  IndustryWeek - 21 hours ago
• Lean Manufacturing 2.0?
  Supply Chain Digest, OH - Feb 5, 2009
• Examining, analyzing and cultivating the skills for tomorrow
  Reliable Plant Magazine, OK - Feb 4, 2009
• Doing well in a down economy
  Concord Monitor, NH - Feb 3, 2009
• Opinion Editorial: It's time to Sink or Swim
  Manufacturer.com, UK - Feb 3, 2009
• time to lean up your act?
  DC Velocity, MA - Feb 1, 2009
• Toyota-Backed Supplier Woes Magnify Carmaker’s Pain
  Bloomberg - Jan 29, 2009
• Modular lean is the start not the end
  Materials Handling World Magazine, UK - Feb 2, 2009
• Family firm finds itself in demand
  nebusiness.co.uk, UK - Feb 9, 2009
• Asia Pacific sees emerging aerospace manufacturing plants
  Middle East North Africa Financial Network, Jordan - 14 hours ago

In the Blog

Join over 5,000 readers who get their daily dose of blunt manufacturing reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog!

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Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:

• End Game at Wiremold - How one of the classic lean success stories has fallen so far... and may not survive.
• Does Your Organization Need a Truth-o-Meter? - Are your initiatives, priorities, and metrics visible... like Obama's?
• Motorola Follows the Dell Model to Doom - Aiming for success by killing your core competency... how does that work?
• Waste in Speed? - Moving too fast can cause you to move slow later.
• The Conundrum of Executive Pay - Should executive pay really be limited? If so, by whom?
• The $1 Trillion Lean Health Care Opportunity - How easy it would be to save big bucks with lean health care.
• Beware of Service Creep - Just like companies have design creep, can the government have service creep?
• Building a Future of Waste - The danger of the new mega container carriers.
• Boeing Abandons the Hollywood Model - Shifting gears on outsourcing policy, and the surprising source of that policy in the first place.
• The Problems with Czars and Czarinas - Auto czar, climate czar, performance czar, health care czar... how can any of them be effective with no real authority?

Visit the Evolving Excellence blog...

Upcoming Events

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Featured Book

Principles of Mass and Flow Production

By Frank Woollard and Bob Emiliani

Principles of Mass and Flow Production is a 55th Anniversary Special Reprint Edition of Frank G. Woollard's long-forgotten book published in 1954, and includes Woollard's amazing 1925 paper "Some Notes on British Methods of Continuous Production." Both are presented as unabridged digitized images of the original works, and include commentary and analysis by noted Lean management practitioner, author,and educator, Bob Emiliani, Ph.D.

More information - Previous featured books

Featured Article

  Frank G. Woollard: Forgotten Pioneer of Flow Production

  By Bob Emiliani, The CLBM LLC
 

The historical record of the origins of Lean management centers almost exclusively on Ford Motor Company in the 1910s and 1920s and Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1950s through the 1970s. There is no mention of the British automaker Morris Motors Ltd., the pioneering production work of Frank G. Woollard in the mid-1920s, or their possible influence on Toyota Motor Corporation in its formative years. Woollard’s groundbreaking work has been forgotten, overlooked, or ignored. That now has to change.

Those of you who are aficionados of the origins and early industrial applications of Lean managementwill be pleased to know of the publication in January of the 55th Anniversary Special Reprint Edition of Principles of Mass and Flow Production [1]. It revives the brilliant work of a practical engineer named Frank George Woollard (1883-1957) who worked in the British automotive industry in the early 1900s. The new book includes an unabridged digitized copy of his 1954 book Principles of Mass and Flow Production and his landmark 1925 paper titled “Some Notes on British Methods of Continuous Production.” It also includes commentary on Woollard’s work and an analysis of the likely influence of Morris Motors on Kiichiro Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Motor Corporation, by yours truly.

The focus of Principles of Mass and Flow Production and the 1925 paper “Some Notes on British Methods of Continuous Production” is on achieving flow in processes upstream of final automobile assembly. Flow must be also achieved in subcomponent assembly and parts manufacturing, and even into raw material production, to support flow in single-model or mixed-model final assembly. However, Woollard understood that achieving flow in production activities alone is not enough; management and workers must connect all processes, beginning to end, to achieve flow throughout the business. This is an aspect of Lean that most senior managers today have yet to understand, mistakenly thinking that achieving flow in operations is sufficient. Woollard was aware of this in 1925.

Woollard successfully achieved flow production in the context of the British automotive industry starting around 1914, and was also the first to develop and implement mechanical materials handling equipment known as automatic transfer machinery in 1923. His contribution to progressive manufacturing management practices is comparable to that of the legendary Taiichi Ohno (1912-1990), the principal architect of Toyota Motor Corporation’s production system. Without a doubt, anyone interested in Lean management, the evolution of flow production, or the history of industrial management and automation will want to read this very important book.

Read the entire article...

Featured Blog Post

Waste in Speed
by Kevin Meyer

A core aspect of lean is execution, fast execution. Ohno and Shingo often pushed their folks to just try new ideas and refine later instead of endlessly discussing every possible nuance in an attempt at perfect planning... and thereby getting nothing done. There's a lot of logic in that, and many of us have been at organizations that experienced "improvement paralysis."

But there's another side of the story, another aspect or extreme that needs to be avoided as well.

President Barack Obama has pledged to "wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost," but many in the field warn that rushing the process of digitizing patients' records could lead to wasteful spending.

[snip political aspects of story, from both sides]

An unrealistically fast rollout could lead to unqualified technicians installing systems in ways that lead to frustration and backlash among doctors, warns Mr. Glaser, who serves on the board of the National eHealth Collaborative, a public-private partnership that aims to accelerate the development of health IT. "If it's too hasty, you can create so many bad experiences that people say...'My data's a mess and my patients are angry,'" Mr. Glaser says.

Waiting for the perfect solution doesn't work. Jumping too quick is wasteful as well, both in terms of inappropriate or ineffective technologies and solutions being installed, but also in terms of creating customer frustration... which leads to difficulty embracing what could be a positive change over the long haul.

Read more and comment (10 comments so far)...

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