The U.S. should focus on lean before bailouts!
How many factories have you walked into and thought, “Wow, these guys could use some lean manufacturing processes in order to improve their services and reduce costs?”
How many times have you had a supplier that produced a good product but had cost problems, quality issues or service issues?
Before we talk about bailouts, shouldn’t we be required to get lean?
Let me make a commercial for industrial policy in the United States. We should ensure that our workforce is trained, that our management learns and understand lean, and works to implements lean principles in all that they do.
How can one car company that is lean apply lean to dealerships, whereby they sell four times more cars than another giant car company that is not lean and has a sick dealer network that is bloated with inefficiency and cost? Where is our use of lean?
Before we go and lay folks off or before we give money for a bailout or before we turn around and cut wages, shouldn’t we require our teams to employ lean kaizen techniques to get folks engaged in the running of the business and help us get our companies profitable and continuously improving?
And what about lean processes for government processes? How much waste could we eliminate if we were lean here, too?
What are your thoughts and ideas on how to get there? I would love to hear what you think.
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Filed Under: Featured, Lean Manufacturing | Tags: continuous improvement, kaizen, Lean Manufacturing
