Manufacturing improvement and the Rolling Stones

Manufacturing improvement and the Rolling Stones

By John Crossan • on October 24, 2009

If you’re like me, you’ve listened to the Rolling Stones over the years. Their contemporaries, the Beatles, became more artistic and lyrical as they evolved. (”Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as Jerry Seinfeld would say.) But for driving party music, the Stones, even after all these years, are still hard for

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CI groups can do more harm than good to lean efforts

CI groups can do more harm than good to lean efforts

By Eric Bigelow • on March 10, 2010

As strange as it may sound, I believe that continuous improvement (CI) culture is something that many organizations resist without realizing it. Sometimes it is not a mountain to climb but an anthill to step over. In this blog, I will discuss that anthill as I have seen it. Culture is defined as integrated

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Coke, Pepsi and lean: Is it all in the packaging?

Coke, Pepsi and lean: Is it all in the packaging?

By Eric Bigelow • on March 2, 2010

I have been a developing change agent at my company for about five years now. I have saved my company a lot of money and have been promoted twice. I have had the opportunity to be trained by multiple lean consulting firms and have traveled to Japan, Mexico and California for continuous improvement training.

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Best-selling checklists?

Best-selling checklists?

By John Crossan • on February 16, 2010

As an unrepentant checklist fanatic/junkie, I recently had to pick myself up off the floor in an airport newsstand (not a bookstore, but a newsstand!). There with all the romance novels, Dan Brown books and the latest silver-bullet management books was The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande. A best-selling

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Follow-up, performance matrix frequently absent from CMMS process flow

Follow-up, performance matrix frequently absent from CMMS process flow

By Kris Bagadia • on February 9, 2010

Many organizations are using their computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) as a recordkeeping tool. If that’s all they want, a spreadsheet perhaps can suffice. A correctly used CMMS is a tool that goes way beyond recordkeeping. By not fully utilizing the CMMS, maintenance operations are

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Expert advice on how to deal with difficult people

Expert advice on how to deal with difficult people

By Debbie Zmorenski • on February 3, 2010

One of the first people to study difficult employees in the workplace and to assign specific characteristic descriptors to these groups of people was Robert M. Branson. In 1981, he wrote a book called “Coping with Difficult People.” In this book, he identifies seven categories of difficult

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An examination of problem-solving and the ‘Error Pyramid’

An examination of problem-solving and the ‘Error Pyramid’

By Bernie Price • on January 21, 2010

When faced with the task of “improving plant efficiency”, the average plant manager breaks the task down by the five or six existing “departmental silos”. Each silo leader subdivides responsibility, repeating the mistake, and passes it on to individuals. As a result, we see young,

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A game plan to resolve conflict in the workplace

A game plan to resolve conflict in the workplace

By Debbie Zmorenski • on January 18, 2010

Conflict in the workplace seems to be a fact of life. We’ve all seen situations where different people with different goals and needs have come into conflict. And, we’ve all seen the often-intense personal animosity that can result. Organization leaders are responsible for creating a work

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Reduce or eliminate waste through training

Reduce or eliminate waste through training

By Robert Apelgren • on January 14, 2010

Following along with my blog “Reliability is a green initiative”, I would like to talk about waste reduction by training. Waste is seen in many different forms in manufacturing, and many of these wastes can be reduced or eliminated through training. Training is one of the first costs to be

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Lean maintenance: Is it a new concept or another ‘acronym’?

Lean maintenance: Is it a new concept or another ‘acronym’?

By Tor Idhammar • on January 13, 2010

It seems as if new weight loss programs and products come out every week. The latest I saw was a plastic wrap that you place around your stomach called “Sauna Fit”. If you strap it around your stomach, you will sweat and lose weight. Brilliant! I’m thinking that you’ll probably

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Why improvement efforts fail

Why improvement efforts fail

By John Crossan • on December 29, 2009

Why do improvement efforts fail or perhaps not sustain the gains? There are many reasons, but those most often stated are “lack of commitment” and not “following the process”. But why is there lack of commitment, and why aren’t processes followed? Here are a few of the reasons

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