Archive for December 2024
How to Minimize Downtime During Digital Change
The integration of Industry 4.0 solutions can significantly enhance operational efficiency, particularly in terms of minimizing downtime. However, achieving these outcomes requires careful planning and execution. Fortunately, there are three key steps that can enhance your operations now as you work to implement new technologies while also balancing operational continuity. Reduce asset failure with…
Read MoreWhy We Need Visual Management…
Visual management is a hot topic in lean manufacturing. It is not a do-or-do-not method like kanban or SMED, but it is an underlying soft approach that just makes manufacturing easier. It won’t fundamentally change your operations, but it will smoothen a lot of problems. In this post I will go through the reasons WHY…
Read MoreWhy Operators Need to Measure Their Own Data!
The goal is to have everything relevant easily visible on the shop floor. Ideally, this is through the design of the shop floor as part of visual management. But a lot of other information is hard to see directly and can be shown best through data. Every well-managed shop floor has their different dashboards and…
Read MoreLarge Scale Scrum (LeSS): The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Agile
Modern organizations seek ways to take on larger projects and demands by scaling their agile practices. This is where Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) proves key, helping organizations to apply Scrum principles at scale. What is Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)? Large Scale Scrum, aka LeSS, helps scale agile practices across multiple teams, maintaining the core principles…
Read MoreThe 7 Principles of Lean Software Development: A Guide
Lean principles are helping streamline the processes and drive better results in software development. Toyota’s manufacturing practices invented these principles which overall have changed how nowadays software teams approach development projects. Throughout this lifecycle of development lean software development focuses on increasing the value while maintaining the minimum waste level. Key Highlights Overview of Lean…
Read MoreRobotic Case Picker Doubles Worker Throughput
Designed for use in the consumer packaged goods, food and beverage and medical supplies industries as well logistics and retail, CaseFlow orchestrates a fleet of Vecna Robotics CPJ pallet jack robots to perform all pallet-based travel in a warehouse and direct human pickers, equipped with connected wearables, with tasks generated from a warehouse management system (WMS). Using Vecna’s Pivotal…
Read MoreKaizen Through Growing Your People
As mentioned in my last post, continuous improvement (kaizen) is done through people, ideally close to the shop floor. You should always look for people to develop and grow, as they in turn nurture your continuous improvement. While it is really hard to give specific recommendations that apply to everybody, let me muse a bit…
Read MoreRockwell Automation’s Integration Strategy
“When you think about manufacturing, you can see just how it important it is. From providing food and clean water to medicine and energy, what manufacturers do matters,” said Blake Moret, chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation, establishing the Make it Matter theme at Automation Fair 2024. He added that manufacturing is, of course, also…
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