The Best Job of My Life

These are difficult times to be positive about almost anything, and certainly the nature of work is no exception. The lingering challenges of the pandemic on both the family and one’s professional life, many corporate disruptions across industries, economic instability affecting all of us, and the evolving “world of work” which has certainly become more…

Read More

SMED; A Different Perspective

A lot of people already know about Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED), which is sometimes called Quick Changeover, and the traditional application of it. But anyway, I will briefly explain about the methodology and how to apply it. And then I will tell you about a case where I really had to turn everything…

Read More

The 9 Questions to Ask

Summary: Most companies preparing to launch an Operational Excellence Program do not take a moment to contemplate what their program is hoping to achieve, or even if what they are hoping to achieve is what the company truly needs. These 9 Questions, asked of all the right people, help to get your program properly aligned…

Read More

“It was Like Whack-a-Mole at First”

Supply chain lessons learned from the trenches of 2020. Tony RodriquezMike BeauregardFEB 03, 2021 The COVID-19 chaos of 2020 forced many manufacturers to slow production and delay shipments. It ignited a struggle by health care organizations to equip ICUs, care for patients and protect their workers. Supply chain managers stepped into one of the most…

Read More

How leaders can use emotional intelligence to connect with all employee types

Figuring out how to effectively manage employees with different personalities and working styles is a critical part of emotionally intelligent leadership. BY HARVEY DEUTSCHENDORF 3 MINUTE READ Organizations have spent a lot of time, effort, and resources in recent years  to find ways to motivate employees. From office perks, to personality tests designed to determine working styles and preferences—many employers…

Read More

Let’s Celebrate Work

Lean thinking is about, more than anything else, rethinking, reimagining what work can be. John Shook JAN 14, 2021 We need to think about redefining work. Until we—anyone who wishes to bring about organizational change—redefine our business’s actual value-creating work, we haven’t made any meaningful changes. You may be able to create wealth through a variety of business…

Read More

Lean As A Habit

The fact that lean methods and practices are too often seen as “events” rather than “habits” is a common cause of program failure. Rick Bohan JAN 11, 2021 There’s a good bit of literature out there that reports on the high failure rates of large initiatives like a lean enterprise implementation. Do a websearch on…

Read More

Lean and Continuous Improvement 2020: 12 Top Reads in the Past 12 Months

Here are a dozen of our best read articles on lean and continuous improvement. If you haven’t read them yet, then what are you waiting for? Jill Jusko DEC 16, 2020 It is the end of the year, a time when we look back and review what content on IndustryWeek.com caught our audience’s attention. And…

Read More

Making Your Virtual Kaizen Initiative a Success

What should your company do and ask before diving in? Here’s a roadmap to guide your efforts. Tony Rodriquez Kate McGovern Mike Beauregard NOV 18, 2020 Long, long ago, Kaizen events meant walking-around observation and value stream mapping in face-to-face and elbow-to-elbow meetings. We believed that sharing respiratory space was essential to discover our company’s…

Read More

The Post-Pandemic Production Floor

September 25, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming the way businesses operate faster and more profoundly than possibly any other event in the history of the world.  For instance, in 2019, if we were to tell business leaders that the bulk of their white-collar workforce would be working from home for an extended period of…

Read More