Online Lean Manufacturing Tutorials

Tutorials on Lean Production / Lean Manufacturing from the Defense Acquisition University. The site includes five short online videos by James Womack. The site provides a nice introduction to lean ideas.

Mr. John Shook... "Lean Manufacturing is a manufacturing philosophy which shortens the time between the customer order and the product build/shipment by eliminating sources of waste."
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Key lean principles are:
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- Waste minimization by removing all non-value added activities making the most efficient use of scarce resources (capital, people, space), just-in-time inventory, eliminating any safety nets.

- Continuous improvement (reducing costs, improving quality, increasing productivity) through dynamic process of change, simultaneous and integrated product/process development, rapid cycle time and time-to-market, openness and information sharing.

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- Long-term relationships between suppliers and primary producers (assemblers, system integrators) through collaborative risk-sharing, cost-sharing and information-sharing arrangements.

Design of Experiments Articles

We have added several Design of Experiments articles to the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library recently, including:

• Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter by George Box
• Rethinking the Paper Helicopter by David H. Annis
  

• DOE It Yourself by Mark J. Anderson, A list of Design of Experiments excercizes that can be done in a classroom setting or as home by students with short explanations and links to documents online wtih more details.

• A Personal Story of DOE by Bill Kappele


Back in the lab, I tackled ink with DOE. I was able to perform a small number of experiments and learn about interactions among the ingredients. I could see which ingredients appeared to be the most important, which ingredients interacted, and which interactions were most important. This really was a powerful technique


• What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs? by George Box
  

Managing for Creativity

Managing for Creativity by Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight, July-August 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Over many years, the leaders of SAS Institute have distilled a set of principles for getting peak performance from creative people. Among them: Value the work over the tools, reward excellence with challenges, and minimize hassles.
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Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS has been in the top 20 of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year it’s been published. The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%.
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since the pioneering work of Frederick Herzberg, managers have known that learning and being challenged motivate workers more than money or fear of disciplinarian bosses. What’s different about SAS is that it goes to uncommon lengths to find the right intrinsic motivator for each group of employees.

Much management knowledge is not put into practice. I do not agree "managers have known that learning and being challenged motivate workers more than money or fear of disciplinarian bosses." Maybe good managers know this, but I would wager a vast majority of managers believe the opposite.

Scobleizer on David Anderson

Scobleizer, one of the most popular blogs (say in the top 50 most read), posted recently about David Anderson. Robert Scoble is a Microsoft employee with the title, technical evangelist. David Anderson is also a Microsoft employee working on Agile Management for software development. David incorporates a good deal of Deming's ideas, lean thinking, theory of constraints, etc. in posts to his Agile Management Blog:

I interviewed David Anderson this evening. This guy is inspiring. He writes the Agile Management blog. He's working with teams here at Microsoft to get us to improve our software development process and is getting radical results. More when I get the video done.

I don't see evidence of the video anywhere. Please let me know if you see it.

Deming and Six Sigma

The first Curious Cat Management Improvement blog post was on the Six Sigma and Deming Philosophies

Recently the Deming Electronic Network has returned to this topic.

The Quality Advisor web site has an article on this topic: Deming and Six Sigma

The Six Sigma process can be seen to offer a parallel to Deming's Plan-Do-Study-Act Cycle, although Six Sigma brings experimental design and regression analysis to the forefront in the "plan" phase. Six Sigma also emphasizes design as a key function for achieving six sigma performance levels, and devotes attention to planning the design phase of production. Deming, too, emphasized "Plan" in his four-state cycle, promoting the importance of establishing a relationship between desired output and required input as well as necessary production processes.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the approaches is Deming's focus on the responsibilities of management, outlined in his "The 14 Obligations of Management," and "The Deadly Diseases." The Six Sigma approach, by contrast, lays out a more rigid structure of roles and responsibilities throughout an organization, including executive management, a senior champion, deployment champions, project champions, deployment master black belts, project master black belts, project black belts, process owners, and six sigma green belts.

What would Deming do? by David R. Schwinn

I started thinking that it might be interesting to ask, "What would Deming do (WWDD)?" as it relates to Six Sigma theory and practice...

The site doesn't provide links form one part to the next so here those links are:

part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5

Fashion-Incubator on Deming's Ideas

Be corrigible:

For example, I was sold on Deming years ago but people still aren't talking about his ideas. If there were a Nobel prize for manufacturing, Deming should have won it

It is true Deming's ideas do not get the attention they deserve, in my opinion. However, it is interesting to note the recent BBC radio program on Deming (available online) and Business Week including him in their list of the Top 25: Influential Business Leaders. Our Curious Cat Deming Connections is an attempt to provide quick and easy access to resources on his ideas including many great articles.

The Quality of Lean

The Quality of Lean post on Evolving Excellence.

Lean has become so popular that companies (especially General Motors) have been snatching up lean experts, especially those with true TPS experience. Toyota itself is having difficulty finding and training appropriate people for their new plants, and in many cases are having to rely on the Lean experts at their component suppliers. This has even led to Toyota outsourcing Lean management for some plants

Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt

Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt, CEO, GE.

What makes a growth leader today, and how does that differ from the sort of leader who was effective at GE in the past?

GE has always been a believer in leadership development. When the economy was growing 5% a year, when oil was $14 a barrel, and when the world was at peace, the science of management was all about the how-to. That was the how-to generation. You didn't have to think about the what. Instead, there were management initiatives such as Six Sigma, which was the how.

So most of management literature, certainly for the past 10 years, was all about the how-to. I think we're now in the what-and-where generation. Global economies are slow and more volatile. Oil is at $50 a barrel. So this ability to pick markets, growth trends, customers, and to do segmentation -- that is management today. We have a generation of people who know how to do process flow charts. We have a generation of people who know how to do quality function deployment and things like that, but don't necessarily know why we're doing them. What's the what and the where? I believe that wholeheartedly. Nothing is completely black and white, but we are in a completely different cycle of what good managers know how to do.

I must say this doesn't make much sense to me, but I am not the CEO of a huge company so maybe I just don't understand. I don't see any reason why managers in the past shouldn't have had the qualities he seems to be saying are needed now. And I don't see any reason why the qualities needed now were not needed in the past. This sure seems like a bunch of words saying nothing to me: perhaps I just don't see the wonderful cloths the emperor has on.

My guess would be that what lead to this quote is not a lack of understanding that managers need the same qualities today they needed 10 years ago but the compulsion to feed the media frenzy for some incredible new insight. It just isn't sexy to say "we need the same leadership qualities we needed in the past." Deming stressed the importance of these "new" qualities he states more than 50 years ago and I think most decent managers have know you need to "know why we're doing them" (QFD or whatever Quality tools).

I don't see any management quality required in:

So this ability to pick markets, growth trends, customers, and to do segmentation -- that is management today."

that wasn't needed 10 years ago just as much as it is today?

Thinking the "how to" is unimportant is something I can't even believe is being said. In fact, it is almost a given that you must be performing the "how to" very well and continually improving that performance (or have a bunch or really lousy competing companies that allow you to fail to do so and stay in business - airlines in American might be a good example of this). Execution ("how to", operational excellence, lean thinking, process improvement...) is among the most important factors today, as it was 10 years ago and will be 20 years in the future. Maybe I am wrong but in my opinion Toyota, Dell, Walmart are examples of what is being done by companies that execute well. My belief is they will continue to win customers due to that execution for many years into the future.

Customer focus and innovation would also be at the top of the list of important issues and were 10 years ago and will be 20 years from now. What is important for management is does not change much.

occasionally innovation is so dramatic it drastically changes the practice of management, two examples:
1) the use of information technology
2) the whole quality movement [Deming's ideas, SPC, Toyota/Lean, Six Sigma...

The Art of Lean

The Art of Lean, by Michael Rovito, The Sunday Challenger, Kentucky

The lean style is the process of eliminating all waste in a manufacturing company by streamlining and simplifying shipping.

Three key tools, according to Martichenko, make for a successful lean style: increased frequency of deliveries, reduction of lot size for those deliveries and leveling the flow of material in a plant throughout the week.

Top 25: Influential Business Leaders

Top 25: Influential Business Leaders

Leaders like Warren Buffett (No. 4), CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan (No. 9) and business consultant W. Edwards Deming (No. 22) changed the ways we do business.
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Deming, using his theories of management and quality control, helped turn Japan into a manufacturing powerhouse.

Lists such as this don't have much value. However, I do think they have a little value in getting people to think about some important innovations in business. But honestly, I wouldn't be writing about it except that they lists Dr. W. Edwards Deming in this list, along with the likes of Gates, Grove, Welch, Dell, Walton and Bezos. I hope that encourages some people to take a look at Deming's ideas or perhaps encourages some to discuss Deming's ideas. For more on Deming's ideas see the Curious Cat Deming Web. I am glad they recognized his contributions, I think things will be better if Deming's ideas are kept alive and mentions, such as this list, keep his ideas alive to the general public.