Posts Tagged ‘Georgetown pathway’
Note: The following is part of a series written and delivered as a presentation to SMC Business Council’s Manufacturing Group on 05.13.2010. I am sharing it with our blog readers to stimulate a discussion. Feel free to weigh in and give me your comments. I’ll be posting it over the next few weeks to allow time for the discussion to evolve. A special thanks to Tom Henschke, newly appointed President at SMC for the opportunity to share the message. The Premise: Your Lean System Might Stink… In order to produce world-class results, lean or operational excellence must...
Current State: the problem with North American implementation of Lean (This is the fifth post in this series. If you’ve missed any of the previous posts, check them out by clicking on the “May” link at the right. We are thinking that there are some comments out there. Feel free to post your thoughts. We would love to hear from you!) I’ve given you an idea for where our current state problem began, but let’s look at how it is manifested in our own organizations today. The first thing we’ll look at is what a has become known in operational excellence circles as “event-a-holism”. ...
The Ideal Condition for Lean in North America The Ideal Condition for Lean in North America (This is the sixth part of this series on the condition of “lean” in North America. To see the other five parts, check them out in the Archive for this month and last (May). Thanks for the comments you’ve sent and the various tweets and comments on Facebook!) Do you recall the last major emergency your top level team tackled? I’m talking about an emergency that spanned the entire top level team and required each one of them to dig in to help. Let’s think about that and try...
Date: 31 Jul, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Health Care | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence
Assuming that all of us would answer that question differently and that we would most likely say that we are doing OK, but are not yet world class, we need next to consider the gap between our current condition and ideal and develop what I call the target condition. Let’s face it: we won’t become world class overnight. It takes time and a lot of hard work. We shouldn’t just shrug the shoulders and go back to business as usual, as comfortable as that may be. Rather, we need to develop a target condition, one that we develop while aiming at the ideal, world class. Before we do that, however,...
(This is the fourth installment from a speech given at SMC Business Councils a few weeks ago. You can see the previous installments by clicking this SMC Speech tag. The result will give you all the posts.) Around the time when Womack was publishing the first version of Lean Thinking, the seminal Toyota plant in North America, the one they built in Georgetown, Kentucky was celebrating its tenth anniversary. Some of its earliest leaders were moving on to different and new seasons and careers. Some of those early leaders went on to show organizations how to implement the Toyota Production System. ...
(This is the third installment from a speech given at SMC Business Councils a few weeks ago. You can see all the installments by clicking this SMC Speech tag. The result will give you all the posts.) Where would one look for the things that we need to do to eliminate waste? Well, because Womack’s system was presumably extracted from Toyota, one has to look at the source. In droves, we flocked to see what Toyota was doing. And we saw a lot, didn’t we? We saw cellular manufacturing, we saw the artifacts of pull systems – kanbans, we saw a pull cord that triggered a light and...
