Category Archives: lean manufacturing (6)

Speaking at the 2003 Shingo Conference, Guy Briggs, General Manager of North American operations for General Motors lamented, “We spent the 1980’s..

Today is a favorite holiday for me, full of make-believe supernatural and candy, and unencumbered for the most part by significance. For this..

With our annual Northeast LEAN Conference just a few days away, I want to relate a personal story about the theme of this year’s conference, The..

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This quote from George Orwell’s political allegory, Animal Farm, occurred to..

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first US astronaut to journey to the “final frontier.” Atop a Mercury rocket, Shepard launched into a..

At GBMP’s launch of the Shingo Institute’s BUILD EXCELLENCE workshop, it occurred to me that perhaps systems thinking might be more aptly named..

For me, Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo are a bit like the Lennon and McCartney of waste elimination. Together they frame the technical and social..

I grew up in a small manufacturing company where nine different languages were spoken. English was the language of managers, office workers and some..

Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes. In fact, the..

Here is an article I wrote ten years ago, recently resurrected from the lost letter file. I can’t remember why I wrote it or for whom. Originally..