Who is the Grand Poobah of Toyota Production System? The Wizard of Lean? His Royal Eminence of Efficiency? Sure, he had some help, but Taiichi Ohno was the behind-the-scenes master of what is now known as Lean Manufacturing. Time to appreciate a significant quality forbear! This year would have marked…
Do you ever walk into a store and know at a glance where to find what you need? Do you notice that seemingly long lines can often move really quickly? Do you find yourself wondering why things don't go horribly wrong more often? Lean Six Sigma is at work!…
I write this blog at the risk of disappointing many people - okay, women - across the globe who love to buy shoes and amass gorgeous shoe collections. I hear you! For a long time, I reveled in the joy of buying snazzy shoes and spent plenty of time admiring…
Lean manufacturing first became known in the late 1970’s as “Kanban” or “Just-in-Time,” and was often considered a distinctly Japanese approach for dealing with suppliers. Its application beyond Japan was doubtful, but over the years we learned that there was much more to what became known as the Toyota Production…
Some young parents look like extras on The Walking Dead. Others sound like truant officers about to haul their kids off to the pokey. But some seem to have a secret formula for maintaining a high-functioning, kid-filled household. What follows are some brilliantly simple, Lean visual routines offered by largely…
So what does yard work have to do with Lean or Agile? They both benefit from something called a Kanban Board. Kanban is Japanese for "signboard" which was originally developed as a way to regulate production at Toyota. You’re probably thinking, "Mixing yard work with software. What?" At its core,…
A Kanban Board is relative of the Kanban cards (Kanban is Japanese for "signpost") that were originally developed to aid production at Toyota. Instead of "cards" the Kanban Board uses sticky notes or other visuals to represent tasks. These visual tasks move through different lanes to indicate where they are…
Kanban is a Japanese term that translates to "card" or “board” and indicates some form of signal within a process. Kanbans are part of Just In Time (JIT) processing where either a physical or electronic device indicates that it’s time to order inventory, process a unit or move to the…