On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on […]

Almost done now. If you missed Part 1 ,click here, Part 2 is ,here. If not, here’s the final scuffle with the UK Director. 30 October I wrote: Hi [Brand Director], You’re expecting my email I assume and I hope [Dealer Principal] has briefed you in advance. For your ease I have invested time collating the […]

By Pascal Dennis (bio) One of my great work pleasures is helping to translate the System of Profound Knowledge, as Deming called it, for new and different industries. Taiichi Ohno, Deming, Shingo, Juran et al have given us fundamental principles gained through hard experience. But we have to translate these so they work for us […]

Few things will demoralize employees more easily than feeling like they’re not being appreciated for their efforts. Making sure that employees who are delivering effort and results hear you express something along the lines of “thanks for your hard work” is vital. Even this basic action gives them recognition for their efforts, which becomes feedback […]

If you missed Part 1 ,click here. If not, here’s the continued wrangle with the Dealer Principal. 30 September I wrote to [Dealer Prinicpal & cc’d Service Manager]: Good Afternoon [Dealer Principal], Your thoughts on the attached email trail please.  Russell Watkins —————————————————————————————————————- 1 October I wrote: [Dealer Principal], Thank you for your phone message […]

By Pascal Dennis (bio) The past several years the Lean Pathways team and I have been lucky enough to work in agriculture. Good, smart, well-trained people, an instinctive grasp of the PDCA cycle, and a solid ethical foundation. The soil, so to speak, is fertile indeed. (And the gemba is often glorious.) We should tip […]

We review techniques from histograms to Kernel Density Estimators (KDE) to analyze the variability of measurements through the example of water quality data from India in 2021. The post Analyzing Variation with Histograms, KDE, and the Bootstrap appeared first on Michel Baudin's Blog.

In this post I would like to talk about two other plants that we visited as part of the Van of Nerds in France. One is a railway repair and maintenance plant by SNCF, and the other is a body shop and final assembly by the well-known French car maker Renault. Both offered interesting insights. […]

The 1:10:100 rule is a principle that suggests it is more cost-effective to invest in preventative measures to avoid problems rather than waiting until problems occur and trying to fix them later. The rule states that for every $1 spent on prevention, $10 can be saved on corrective measures, and $100 can be saved on […]

The downside of growing lean skill is the gnawing certainty that almost all systems are broken, creating varying degrees of pain for Customers. There is a helpful upside to this world weariness when wrestling with even Toyota ,(see here) or Lexus, the subject of this 3 part blog. That upside is the question “What is […]

By Pascal Dennis (bio) Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader.General George S. Patton Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.Napoleon Bonaparte Plenty of misconceptions about this one. We seem to think that developing our strategy entails asking each member of […]

Thanksgiving Day has evolved over the years as an important holiday. It is not just about feasting and merrymaking. The tradition of Thanksgiving dinner teaches us to appreciate the finer things in life. It is about showing one’s gratitude for the blessings that we are showered with. In all the hustle and bustle of getting […]

In this article, I will briefly run through the process of workload balancing; what is it, what does it do, and how do you do it? I will follow up that description with an actual case in a manual assembly process of a shutter used in an internet connector. It is a funny case because […]

This is the first in a series of posts about learnings from the Van of Nerds tour of 11 manufacturing sites in Northern France completed on September 9. First, I describe who we are, why and how we went on this tour. Then, to make this post more than just an introduction, I appended a […]

FEATURE – Whether improvement efforts are paying off and people are internalizing a lean way of thinking is a constant worry for many leaders. Here’s a trick to gauge how well – or how poorly – things are going in your transformation. Words: Darren Walsh, Senior Lean Coach, Lean Enterprise Academy Have you wondered why your […]

A blog like this would usually be titled “Best of…” but I don’t subscribe to the idea of “best” when it comes to knowledge transfer. How can you compare the benefits of person A picking up the right bit of knowledge at the right time to help them with their own situational conundrum, to person […]

By Pascal Dennis (bio) In a previous blog I introduced the idea of Economy I & II The former comprises private sector companies like Apple, Amazon, Toyota and GE. These companies face withering competition every day. As a result, they’re wonderful at creating value, but not so good at creating jobs. Economy II, by contrast, […]

I’ve long relished intentional periods of solitude to reflect and renew.  I’ll often take advantage of the six mile stretch of beach between Morro Bay’s [hopefully] extinct volcano a couple blocks from my house and the next seaside village of Cayucos.  Aside from a handful of surfers there is almost no one on the beach, […]

Recently I was on The Lean Solutions podcast with Patrick Adams. Patrick and I are good friends, this is my third time as a guest on his podcast and I wrote the foreword to his book, Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap: 12 Questions to Understand What’s Truly Underneath Your Culture. Patrick also signed up for […]

SOP A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a set of step-by-step instructions that provides clear and consistent guidance on performing a particular task or activity. SOPs are designed to help ensure that work is performed consistently and in compliance with relevant regulations and guidelines. They can be used in various settings, including businesses, government agencies, […]

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on […]

The title of this blog is a line from a poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. He died in 1939 so would have no idea that his poem “Traveler, your footprints” holds a key lesson for strong lean thinking (and life!). The poem (translated by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney) goes a bit like […]

By Pascal Dennis (bio) “Think outside the box” “Ducks in a row” “Low-hanging fruit” “Let’s take this off-line” Why do these and other corporate clichés make us cringe so? Well, they’re often used by lazy people to express stale, tired thinking. If we haven’t thought about something deeply, why burden people with inanities? If we […]

We’re living through some crazy times and dealing with issues that were not anticipated during planning sessions.  Every day we’re confronted with new information, new analyses of facts and opinions, creating new decisions that need to be made that can dramatically impact our lives.  The organizations, and individuals, that are handling the chaos (or opportunity!) […]

This is the perspective of Cécile Roche about what we saw in the Van-of-Nerds tour in September, 2022: The risk when we talk about digital, even more than when we talk about Lean, is to worry about processes before worrying about products. We must never forget that a process is never an end in itself. […]

INTERVIEW – Ahead of this week’s Lean Global Connection, we talk to one of the speakers, who is trying to create a foundry that is lean from the start. Interviewee: Dariusz Dziuba, General Manager, Cranfield Foundry Planet Lean: Can you please introduce Cranfield Foundry to our readers? Dariusz Dziuba: We are modern and environmentally friendly […]

What does “winning” mean to you as a leader?  What is a leader’s role in creating a winning culture and organization? How do leaders create a clear strategy and connection with purpose so that employees understand how their activities fit within the company’s overall vision? Billy Taylor Shows Us How Continuing my author interview series […]

Define your business: Start by clearly defining what your business does, its target market, and its unique value proposition. Set goals and objectives: Identify your short-term and long-term goals and the specific objectives that will help you achieve them. Conduct a SWOT analysis: A SWOT analysis is a tool that helps you assess your business’s […]

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to […]

As many of you know we, at Sempai, have been busy testing our new Lean Toolkit App (SempaiGuide) with some amazing manufacturers. We all know the pitfalls of creating something innovative without talking to your customer (the Sinclair C5 springs to mind) and so we wanted to test, test and test some more to make […]

By Pascal Dennis (bio) In this piece I focused on our personal qualities that make Lean so hard to sustain (e.g. our innate trickiness and laziness). A number of folks asked me to talk some more about organizational elements that hinder Lean. Lean’s foundation is Standards and Connections – (Rules 1 and 2 of the […]

As we approach the arbitrary end of the year, many organizations are beginning the planning cycle for next year.  Part of that process should be identifying what projects and activities should be stopped, for several reasons – performance, alignment with strategy, and so forth.  However, equally if not more important is creating a process (and […]

Elsasser pointed out that in the phase space of any organism, considered as a purely physical system, is in general of very high dimension. He argued further that the states in this phase space which are compatible with life will generally tend to be sparsely distributed in such as phase space; specifically, they will form […]

Most leaders who adopt the continuous improvement management style focus mainly on performance indicators that can be measured for good reasons. Metrics like cost, production throughput, error rates, customer satisfaction scores, and other quantifiable business metrics guide decisions related to improvement priorities and provide insight into the impact of implemented changes. However, many factors that […]