Preventive maintenance is the set of steps taken to avoid breakdowns in machines. These steps may include minor activities such as topping off fluids, inspection, lubrication, filter changes, and tightening as needed. It may also include more significant actions such as overhauls, rebuilds, and component replacement. In between those extremes Read more…
How important is it to report cost savings for every individual improvement event? Let me start by telling you a little story. I once had a vice president of operations who, while talking to a group of leaders from the company, said something to the effect that if all of Read more…
When looking at an operation, if you are trying to help make it better, you will need a few tricks in your toolkit to be able to make quick judgements on where to spend your time digging deeper. I don’t advocate ever taking any significant action without a clear, data-based Read more…
p>Mark Twain famously said something to the effect of, “If I had more time I would’ve written a shorter story.” There’s a paradox that it can be harder to build a simple solution than a complicated one. That’s because we have been conditioned to…
An effective business management system built upon a continuous improvement culture demands a great deal of structure. While conventional wisdom says rigidity in processes stifles creativity, the truth is that when the structure is well designed…
One of the knocks against Lean and continuous improvement is that it treats people like robots. This is true only when it is poorly executed. Standard Work and other forms of standardization do require people to do work the same way every time.
The problem is that…
Most people take a passive approach to learning. They just absorb lessons rather than try to dive into problems and take wisdom away from failure. To be successful at building a continuous improvement culture, you have to take a different approach to learning.
An organization will not get better unless it…
p>Everything a company does can be boiled down to a process. Even highly flexible, creative jobs are processes.
When a process is followed the same way every time…
The word “Can’t” is not compatible with continuous improvement. It is surprising how many things that “can’t” be done get accomplished by people and teams when they actually try. “Can’t” becomes an excuse for not attempting. It also is frequently treated as gospel when people say something “can’t be done.” Read more…
A facilitator is an individual who instructs, coaches, and guides project teams towards their continuous improvement objectives. This person may be facilitating as a secondary role or as their primary function. They may also be an employee of the company that they are coaching, or they may be an individual Read more…
Machines are essential to production environments, but not all machines are created equal. The impact of breakdowns varies widely. Because resources are limited, it is important to have a strategy to manage machines according to how critical they are to the operation and how hard they are to repair. An Read more…
Reproducibility is the ability of a process to be duplicated by multiple people. This concept is understood and highly valued in both the scientific method and when creating measurement systems. In fact, in gauge R&R, one of the “R’s” stands for reproducibility (the other is repeatability). We recognize that a Read more…