Heroes save the day. Heroes turn around the disaster and rescue the puppy from the burning building. Heroes are admired, and everybody wants to be one. Everybody wants a hero when they need one.
But what about the people who prevent the need of a hero? What about the people that make sure the disaster never happens? What kind of people do you really need in your company?
Industry 4.0 is (still) all the rage in manufacturing industry. I’ve already took A Critical Look at Industry 4.0. A lot of Industry 4.0 is hot air with a return on investment only far into the future. However, there are a few ideas that actually may work soon enough. In this post I would like to give my views of what works in Industry 4.0 and what doesn’t.
The Toyota Production System is widely considered to be the best production system for any larger company. Achieving similar performance is the vision (or dream?) of many companies. Pretty much all of lean manufacturing is the attempt to copy the approach of Toyota in the hope of a similar stellar performance. Yet most lean transformations fall way short of the goal. In this blog post I would like to give some insights, from a historical perspective, on why lean so often fails.
Most of the material you purchase eventually goes (hopefully) to the customer. Some will be waste, others may be scrap. Yet a small part is also likely to be stolen, probably by your own employees.
In this post I will look at the effects of theft and give you some industry examples.
On September 27, I did my first Reddit: “I am a … ask me anything.” With almost four hundred comments, I consider it a quite successful AMA.
I am Chris Roser, a professor for production management; a lean expert; a Toyota, Bosch, and McKinsey alumnus; and I’m interested in the past, present, and future of manufacturing. I lived and worked for multiple years in the USA, in Japan, and in Europe. I run a blog, AllAboutLean.com, and just completed my first book, “Faster, Better, Cheaper” in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond.
Recently I learned about a new ISO 18404 standard certifying lean and Six Sigma organizations. I think this is a highly questionable idea, with little benefit for the quality of lean manufacturing. This certification madness won’t make much difference for the quality of lean but will mostly siphon off money to the International Organization for Standardization and connected bodies for certifications of little practical value. Let me show you the details …
In the last months, there has been an unprecedented power struggle between Volkswagen and its suppliers. Two of the suppliers stopped delivering, leading to a full stop of multiple production lines at six Volkswagen plants, including its main plant Wolfsburg. This whole mess comes on top of the separate problems Volkswagen has had with its Dieselgate. In this post I would like to look in more detail at what happened.
Employment is an exchange of work for money. In my last post I showed a few tricks on how operators keep management in the dark about the true workload. However, management is also not giving out all the details on their side either. Naturally, the true value of the work is difficult to assess. Even if companies could know exactly how much each employee contributes to the success, they probably would keep this information top secret.
More interesting, however, is the value of the target workload, where operators are able to work continuously at 130% capacity without problem. The following are my own thoughts, as I have never seen these conclusions anywhere else before.