Lean Tagged Improvement Insights

The Art of Subtraction

In Matthew May’s new book, The Laws of Subtraction (McGraw-Hill 2013), he outlines some key concepts refined from his years with Toyota:

At the heart of every difficult decision lie three tough choices:

What to pursue versus what to ignore.
What to leave in versus what to leave out.
What to do versus what to don’t.

The key is to remove the stupid stuff: anything obviously excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use or ugly. This is the art of subtraction.

Isn’t that the core of Lean?

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Posted by Jay Arthur in Lean, Manufacturing, Service.

The March 2011 Wired magazine article identifies a new trend in manufacturing: insourcing. An MFG.com survey found that 19% of companies had brought all or part of their manufacturing back to North America. US manufacturing added 136,000 jobs in 2010, the first increase since 1997.

While many small to medium sized businesses moved their manufacturing to China in the early part of the last decade, many are finding benefits from moving production back to the USA:

Rising labor costs in China are making the USA more cost competitive. China wages more than doubled between 2002-2008.
Sheer distance “remains an intractable problem.”

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Posted by Jay Arthur in Six Sigma.

Toyota’s Global Data Mining

Last week, Toyota unveiled it’s multimillion dollar system for gather repair reports, complaints and safety concerns from dealerships, internet sites and other sources into one system and mine that data for problems beyond the doors of the factory. The WSJ reported that EVP Shinichi Sasaki said that Toyota had succumbed to ‘Big Company Disease’.

It happens. Big or small, companies shift their focus to bottom-line benefits or growth and drop the ball on quality. But, as I’ve predicted for awhile, Toyota’s quality culture is repairing itself and resuming the quest for quality; now on a global basis.

What are you doing to monitor your quality on a global basis?

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Posted by Jay Arthur in Lean, Manufacturing, Six Sigma.