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Publisher’s Note: Got Cash?
Today’s global financial crisis has tightened credit markets, making it increasingly difficult and expensive to secure lines of credit. As we collectively face this wave of economic uncertainty, we should focus our lean efforts on quickly reducing working capital to generate cash. Why tie up cash with nonperforming inventory, unprofitable SKUs, or high receivables when you could be using it to fund growth initiatives, purchase capital equipment, cover expenses, or fund acquisition activities?
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Case Study: QuadTech – Using LeanSigma to become the Printing Industry’s Technology Leader
With the entire printing industry in recession, QuadTech has found it more important than ever to embrace LeanSigma® as a way of life in order to provide its customers with complete solutions at competitive prices. With the improvements the company has made through lean over the past five years, QuadTech is now strategically placed to run a different race and reinforce its position as a market leader.
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Leadership & Culture: The Secret Ingredients of a Successful Lean Transformation
A popular, and perennial, topic of discussion among lean practitioners is about culture and the role of leaders in establishing an effective, sustainable lean enterprise. Strong, inspirational, effective leaders are the common denominator of companies who embed a culture of continuous improvement throughout the organization. What is it that strong leaders do to inspire a can-do spirit, achieve breakthrough growth, and retain passionate, engaged employees?
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Accelerated Learning: Focus on Training during a Recession to Stay Competitive
Slashed training budgets are a common casualty of tough economic times, but organizations that teach and implement lean principles view training as a key function that should not be reduced. During a recession, training is a valuable tool for reinforcing a company’s culture, generating cost savings, and preparing for economic upturns.
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Strategic Visioning: Milbank – Keeping Production at Home through a LeanSigma Strategy
Milbank’s enterprise-wide lean philosophy has enabled the company to keep manufacturing in the US and energize union leadership, and has produced impressive results, including $12 million in annualized cost reductions over three years; retirement of all short- and long-term debt; a 9.5 percent market share gain this year; and significantly reduced lead times and inventory dollars.
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Futures: Using Kaizen to Reduce Energy Consumption and Yield Savings
Lean manufacturers use many process-improvement tools to achieve and sustain efficiency, flexibility, and profitability. Such tools have enabled them to swap warehouses of idle inventory for fast-moving information networks; transform capacity constraints into quick-response production; and standardize processes for consistent quality on a global scale. As these same companies manage spiraling energy costs, they are continuing to rely on lean process improvement to reduce waste and protect profits.
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Tech Talk: Progressive 5S: Practice What You Preach
Implementing 5S in an office environment is a challenging and sometimes daunting task. When the staff at the TBM headquarters office decided they needed to “practice what we preach,” implementing progressive 5S was the first step. Here’s their story.
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Think Sync: Lean Distribution Shaping Up to Ship Out
When the trailer pulls away from the dock doors, it’s over. You’ve done all that you can do to ship your customers the right product in the right quantity and have it delivered on time. It’s also your final opportunity to get it wrong, which is why manufacturing executives need to pay as much attention to creating a lean material flow in their picking, packing, and shipping areas as they do in the factory.
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Books to Read and Recommend: The Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way
The Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way (Jeffrey Liker and Michael Hoseus, McGraw-Hill, 2007) is a follow up to Liker’s original book, The Toyota Way, which summarized management’s principles in a 4P model. The main focus of The Toyota Culture is how Toyota establishes its core competency, which is all about respect for people and the importance of continuous improvement.
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Consider This!: Is Lean Certification Right for You?
Most companies realize that they possess neither the internal expertise nor the time to design, train, implement, and sustain a lean program on their own. To ignite an enterprise to embrace a lean culture, an increasing number of manufacturers are turning to a training and mentoring track that provides in-house expertise to help companies not only start but also sustain that transformation: lean certification.
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Field Note: WIKA Receives Recognition for Environmental Efforts
WIKA Instrument Corporation in Lawrenceville, GA, recently announced that it successfully reduced water consumption at its Lawrenceville manufacturing facility by almost 70 percent from its April/May 2007 peak usage of 60,300 gallons per workday to its June 2008 usage of only 18,500 gallons per workday. The company estimates it will save 10.5 million gallons of water annually.
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Lean Champions: CONMED Wins 2008 Perfect Engine Site Award
CONMED, a Utica, New York-based medical technology company, was presented with the fifth annual “Perfect Engine Site” award at the inaugural Lean Excellence Conference in Des Moines, Iowa, in September. The award was in recognition of their French Road location’s commitment to the continuous improvement philosophy and dedication to lean culture.
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