He was a cigar-chomping, salty-tongued educator who wrote a manufacturing love story. Eli Goldratt left us way too soon but will always be appreciated as the man who constantly provoked people to truly think. This year would have marked Eliyahu Goldratt’s 73rd birthday. Born in Israel, Mr. Goldratt was a…
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…
When we envision a project, we often have a pretty good idea of whether or not it could produce a favorable result, but we may not be able to put a value to that result. Sometimes the result we envision is just only the tip of the iceberg, and there…
Politicians refer to hard dollars vs. soft dollars often and I don’t pretend to understand what they mean. For one, it has nothing to do with the hard and soft money we deal with in our improvement work. The distinction between hard and soft money can be confusing, but we’ll…
The Theory of Constraints boils down to the idea that a process is only as good as its weakest link - and the weak links are bottlenecks. This idea was developed by Eliyahu Goldratt and made famous in his book, “The Goal,” a novel based on a production plant. Once…
The Theory of Constraints boils down to the idea that a process is only as good as its weakest link - and the weak links are bottlenecks. This idea was developed by Eliyahu Goldratt and made famous in his book, “The Goal,” a novel based on a production plant. Once…