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Volume 11 Issue 3   |   March 2010   |    www.superfactory.com

From the Editor

Welcome to the Superfactory Newsletter and welcome to a new year! We are now beginning the 11th year of the newsletter!

We are running a promotion with our partner Gemba Academy where we'll send you the Gemba Academy Lean Starter Package DVD, a $97 value, for no cost with the purchase of any Superfactory PowerPoint presentation package or bundle.

In addition, to celebrate the one year anniversary of Gemba Academy which has now grown to include over 70 HD-quality training video modules, Gemba Academy is offering a free set of DVDs. More information about this promotion here.

- Kevin Meyer
 

Manufacturing Excellence News

Stories of interest to the lean community.
 

In the Evolving Excellence Blog

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

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Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:

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Upcoming Events

03/08/2010Value Stream Mapping - Guelph, ON - EMC
03/08/2010Effective Problem Solving - London, ON - EMC
03/09/2010Visual Control Systems - Webster, MA - GBMP
03/09/2010Building the Lean Supply Chain Professional - Atlanta, GA - Georgia Tech
03/09/2010Lean Management Program - Arnprior, ON - EMC
03/10/2010Supporting Leader Standard Work with Visual Management Tools - Cambridge, MA - LEI
03/10/2010Creating Continous Flow - Chatham, ON - EMC
03/10/2010Developing Pull and Kanban Systems - Chatham, ON - EMC
03/10/2010Lean Management Program - Cornwall, ON - EMC
03/10/2010Lean Supervisor - Hamilton, ON - EMC
03/15/2010Lean Accounting Webinar Series - Webinar - BMA
03/16/2010World Class Warehousing and Material Handling - Atlanta, GA - Georgia Tech
03/16/2010Lean Boot Camp- Training a Lean Champion - Atlanta, GA - Georgia Tech
03/22/2010Lean Management Program - Truro, NS - EMC
03/23/2010Building the Lean Fulfillment Stream - Cambridge, MA - LEI
03/23/2010Applications of Lean in Accounting and Admin - Belleville, ON - EMC
03/23/2010Lean Supervisor - Guelph, ON - EMC
03/23/2010Lean Management Program - Moncton, NB - EMC
03/24/2010Environmental Regulation in New Jersey - Morris Plains, NJ - NJ MEP
03/24/2010Applications of Lean in Accounting and Admin - Brockville, ON - EMC
03/24/2010Strategies for Lean Purchasing - Chatham, ON - EMC
03/25/2010Lean Supervisor - London, ON - EMC
03/25/2010Lean Management Program - Saint John, NB - EMC
03/25/2010Applications of Lean in Accounting and Admin - Whitby, ON - EMC
03/30/2010Assistance for Businesses Impacted by Foreign Competition - Morris Plains, NJ - NJ MEP
03/30/2010Value Stream Mapping - Hamilton, ON - EMC
03/31/2010Plant Tour: Bemis Associates - Shirley, MA - GBMP

View the full events calendar...

 

Featured Book

BounceThe Lean Machine

By Dantar Oosterwal

There may be no more iconic American brand than Harley-Davidson. But like many storied companies, Harley has had to evolve to stay on top and at times its very existence has been threatened. Practically extinct in the mid-1980's, the company began a miraculous turnaround centered on a product development and manufacturing revolution. With dramatic improvements in efficiency and bottom-line results, Harley returned to dominance. At the core of this incredible story was author Dantar Oosterwal, who brings the transformation of Harley-Davidson to life in "The Lean Machine". Filled with crucial lessons for any product development environment, it's also a great American success story.

More Information - Previous featured books
 

Featured Article

  Putting Lean Into Orbit

  By Bob Emiliani
 

Last January Jim Womack sent an e-letter to the Lean community titled "Beyond Lean" [1], meaning that it was time for the Lean community to move beyond its benchmark company, Toyota. Perhaps so, but there is still much to learn from them, including how Lean thinking is not actually part of anyone's DNA. Lean leaders can make decisions that are just as dumb as anyone else. While it may be appropriate to move beyond Toyota, we must remain firmly fixed on the "Continuous Improvement" and "Respect for People" principles, practice Lean management in a non-zero-sum manner, and achieve flow in demand-driven buyers' markets for goods and services.

Jim's call to move forward reminds me of the time 20 years ago when I was part of a team of young up-and-coming engineers assigned to work on a new strategic plan. Our leader shared his vision with us and helped frame the strategic plan that he had in mind. But the more we thought about what the boss wanted, the more we realized how impossible his vision was to achieve. You see, the boss was unhappy with the current state and proposed a leap to a future state. This could not have been achieved because the organization was simply not prepared. We were poor at doing basic teamwork in the current state and therefore unprepared to take the first steps towards the future state. The boss's vision was incongruent with the organization's capabilities, something he would never publicly admit and did not want to hear from us.

In his e-letter to the Lean community, Jim said:

"Lean methods for product development, fulfillment from order to delivery, supply stream management, customer support, and management of the overall enterprise are now well known and widely accepted in concept. We’ve won the battle of ideas on how to operate and improve processes. But creating management systems and organizations that can practice (not just preach) lean every day year after year turns out to be a lot harder. "

While the last sentence is accurate, I very much disagree that Lean methods are "now well known and widely accepted in concept" and that "we've won the battle of ideas." If that were true - even only in concept - there would be a year of headlines in The Wall Street Journal about the death of conventional management (the editorial page would go berserk); neoclassical economists would torch their shops and take the insurance money; Yasuhiro Monden, Art Byrne, Gary Kaplan, Brian Maskell, and Cliff Ransom would become full-time analysts on CNBC; and every course in business schools worldwide would undergo massive revision.

Read the entire article | Previous featured articles
 

Featured Evolving Excellence Blog Post

Can you apply lean to pompous bloviation?
by Dan Markovitz

In a post guaranteed to get Bill Waddell up on his horse about Ivy League MBA pinheads, the Harvard Business Review blog just published a piece on "More for Less for More." The authors (who don't actually advertise themselves as Harvard MBAs) maintain that we're entering a new age of scarcity -- diminishing availability of natural resources, and increasing frugality of consumers. As a result,

We believe that this new age of scarcity in the face of ever more demanding consumers will require a new strategy for disruptive innovation and growth that we call More for Less for More (M4L4M): a strategy that places an emphasis on delivering more value for less cost for more people.

Hmm...sounds surprisingly like lean, doesn't it? But why use an established and widely accepted term when you can coin a new word that carries a fancy abbreviation (M4L4M)?

Of course, you can't publish something in HBR without either using the word "innovation" or "disruption" (preferably of the creative kind). Kudos to the authors for innovating the use of "disruptive" as an adjective so that they could combine the two words.

What exactly is disruptive about creative value with less cost? The authors explain that...

Read the rest and comment... (13 comments so far)

 

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