 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Superfactory Newsletter is published monthly to over 50,000 subscribers. Inside Superfactory About -
Articles  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
Join the Superfactory LinkedIn group! |
Volume 10 Issue 3 | March 2009 | www.superfactory.com |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
From the Editor
Last month we told you about Gemba Academy, a new project between the parent of Superfactory, Factory Strategies Group, and Gemba Research and Lean Six Sigma Academy. The project launched a few days ago! Gemba Academy delivers online video training on business transformation concepts, beginning with a 13-module series on Transforming Your Value Stream. Later this month we'll launch 5S, followed by Project Management and Six Sigma. What's unique about Gemba Academy?
Check out Gemba Academy, including the three free video modules on Introduction to Lean, The Ten Commandments of Continuous Improvement, and 5S Overview -- modules you can use now and in the future! - Kevin Meyer |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manufacturing Excellence NewsStories of interest to the lean community.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Upcoming Events
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Featured Book
By Eliyahu Goldratt In The Choice, Eli Goldratt exposes the deep, underlying principles of life embodied in TOC. People are Good. People Think. Emotion is Logical. All Conflicts can be Eliminated. There are always Win-Win Solutions. Systems are Simple. Systems can be Improved Infinitely. Taken together, everyone should succeed. Then, why not? Dr. Goldratt teaches us in a very carefully written way how to find the errors we make and how to correct them. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Featured Article
By Terence Burton, The Center for Excellence in Operations Like everyone else, we have been thinking a lot about our turbulent economy. Despite Administration changes, political promises, and bailout plans no one really knows where this economic meltdown will lead us, when it will end, or what conditions our organizations and retirement accounts will be in by the time we achieve some normalcy in the economy. I’m convinced that none of these people have the answers to all of our organizations’ specific business challenges, and we at CEO are moving forward with new, creative ideas to improve our offerings and competitive position to our clients. One thing is for certain: Sticking steadfastly on how you currently operate your business is a prescription for disaster. If you are watching your revenue and profits fall, while waiting patiently and hopefully for the economy to turn around, it is time to step up and rethink your business model. The things that got us here will not get us through this turbulent economy. Business improvement in a down cycle requires a different focus and approach. Globalization has brought with it a myriad of business challenges, socio-political problems, and an unending list of other uncertainties that require us to be much more conscious of what is happening and run in fast-forward mode. We are all on this treadmill of survival. If you are not improving your business every day, then some other competitor is and your organization is falling behind. Like it or not, this is the World we live in. Business improvement through such strategic initiatives as Kaizen, Lean, and Six Sigma are now needed more than ever before. Even if your organization is currently involved in these initiatives, it’s time to take a closer look at efforts versus results. In this economy, organizations cannot afford political improvement debacles and fad improvement activities with questionable benefits. Only enhanced creativity and innovation in our improvement efforts will relieve the pain points in our businesses. In this economy, a well structured and executed improvement initiative that integrates all improvement tools (e.g., Kaizen or Quick-Strikes, Lean, and Six Sigma), and that is selectively deployed to the highest impact opportunities create a rapid, winning strategy. However, many organizations’ are too slow to reset and leverage their business improvement course for more rapid results. The remainder of this article provides a roadmap for “improving how you improve” in our turbulent economy. Many of our clients have reset their improvement courses and are achieving great successes. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Featured Blog Post
Homozygosity - That's the Problem! Whether it is talking to a group of company executives, speaking before a local APICS chapter, or writing the blog, there is an ever present challenge in my line of work to come up with a clever, amusing, unique angle concerning American manufacturing. I learned long ago that there is a sure fire cure for the occasional bout of writer's block in the elite Eastern academic world. The Knowledge at Wharton folks can always be counted on to write something incredibly stupid. Go ahead and click here to read a story about how Toyota is really screwed by all of this economic upheaval, but they are better off than GM, and how they really didn't take over the auto industry, they just didn't go into free fall like GM, and how they have half of GM's inventory, and they haven't laid anybody off, and, and, and well - they are still really , really screwed. A guy by the name of Mory Taylor who runs Titan Tire and had an obscure run for President a while back hit the nail on the head in explaining how it is that so many people from such prestigious institutions are in such important positions and have fouled things up so thoroughly. He said, "The biggest hoax in this country is that Harvard is going to make you smart. Harvard just gives you connections." He is absolutely right. You might have noticed that I rail a bit about Wall Street - the mortal enemy of lean manufacturing - but as the stock market is on the trash heap, Bernie Madoff is being led off in chains, we taxpayers are sending billions to bail these clowns out, and there are 900+ fraud investigations underway, a bit of gentle, constructive criticism on my part seems justified. The fox responsible for keeping an eye on the Wall Street hen house is the SEC. Let's take a look at their history: Bill Clinton (Georgetown, Oxford, Yale) appoints Arthur Levitt (Williams College - an elite private school in Massachusetts) who presides over the Enron debacle. Levitt is succeeded by Paul Carey (Colgate). George W Bush (Yale, Harvard) takes over and appoints Harvey Pitt (St Johns), followed by William Donaldson (Yale, Harvard). When their collective deregulation of investment banking gives us the Bear Stearns fiasco, we get Christopher Cox (Harvard MBA and Harvard Law). And of course we have a complete meltdown of the capital markets as described previously. Now we have Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard) who has put Mary Schapiro at the helm (Franklin & Marshall College, George Washington). Yeah - I know that these are not all Ivy League, but $50K a year to go rub elbows with the elite at Franklin & Marshall or Williams College assures that you are a member of the same country club as the boys and girls at Harvard and Yale. Notice a pattern here? |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© 2009 Superfactory by Factory Strategies Group LLC. All Rights Reserved |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Welcome to the Superfactory Newsletter!
The Choice
Turbulent Economy Survival Kit