Thought I’d give a shout-out today to a local Pella business, Vermeer Manufacturing, which is celebrating its 60th Anniversary of being in business this year. There is all kinds of Vermeer celebration-related activity going on around town right now, and I also stumbled upon this article about their 60 years in business. Vermeer probably became [...]
Rob Tracy at Intek Plastics (one of my customers) has written this excellent synopsis on Driving Lean through Your Supply Chain. Aside from discussing how the breakdown of your supply chain can negatively impact you and your customers and including a supplier checklist for your use, he also talks about the incorrect assumption that going [...]
…and software can’t manage people. This is the tag-line for our Thrive product. Why? Because this is true. Software by itself typically adds no value to the process it is analyzing (this is a very scary thing for a software vendor to say!). It is the interaction with software…the entering of data, the analysis of [...]
Kevin Meyer over at Evolving Excellence has a new post regarding the strength of manufacturing in the U.S. He has blogged about this before and "debunked" many of the myths about "declining" manufacturing before, but this time he does it again in response to an op-ed piece by the Washington Post. Good stuff!
Seems like a lot of things in manufacturing end up with acronyms. Occasionally you’ll step into a room and think that Robin Williams stepped out of Good Morning Vietnam to conduct the morning training session. A lot of time the acronyms are just created to avoid something long to say, but the ones that are [...]
Seth Godin has it right on this recent post. "The power of a number is the effect we saw when they put a number on restaurants (Zagats) and wines (Parker) and gas mileage (the EPA). People notice a number, and they work to improve it." Lean practitioners have been quoting Taiichi Ohno for quite some [...]
Not sure what it’s referred to as, but at the end of a free webinar today, Jim Womack shared a recent publication of his. It looks pretty cool, and while it can be printed, has some videos that wouldn’t work well on paper. Not sure if it’s accessible to the general public or if you [...]
The Iowa healthcare system is using lean principles to improve quality and cost of healthcare. I was traveling this week and had a chance to get caught up on some podcast listening. During the America’s Business program from last week, Mike Hambrick introduce Vince Newendorp of Vermeer Manufacturing in Pella, IA. Way to go Vince! [...]
Had a great conversation with Scott Whitlock of Flexware Innovation last Friday. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a little island working on technology solutions for manufacturing companies (and I guess a tech company in rural Iowa kind of is a little island), but it was good to talk with Scott because we could share [...]
If you found yourself walking into a room full of lean thinkers for the first time, you may think everyone was speaking another language. And you’d probably be right. Amidst some recognizable English, you’d probably hear a smattering of acronyms and Japanese words that would probably sounds somewhere between Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam [...]
"If future of US depends on my travl agent calling my tennis coach so they can open nail salon,we r in serious trouble" http://t.co/PliUSXlpThursday Mar 1 - 2:31pm