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Direct observation has been an under-appreciated aspect of lean for most of its life. It has gotten a lot more attention in recent years, unfortunately, this is thanks in part to the use of jargon, such as gemba and genchi genbutsu. For those of you who know me, you know

How do you talk about time? Time is like money. We invest both time and money. We spend both time and money. We should (although most do neither) budget time and money. We waste both time and money. The only difference between them is that I can always get more

I have a new post published on StartUp Blog at PartnerUp. See the full article on that site. This is a guest post by Jamie Flinchbaugh. I’ve met a number of people who want to start businesses but have been clawing away at the same idea for many years without

I ran across this over the weekend. I was shocked, but also saw how simple this could make working with simple value stream maps on your computer. It’s a font you can download that contains value stream mapping symbols. You can download it for free from Ambor. I generally don’t

Yesterday was apparently Blog Action Day ’09 on Climate Change. At my last check, 13,163 blogs are writing about climate change today. With that in mind, I partly want to just leave it at that because there is probably a lot said in 1,000s of blogs already. But I’ll add

What blogs do you follow? With twitter folks sharing their favorite follows on Friday’s, I think the bloggers should be doing the same. I’ve found that I’m learning and reading more from bloggers these days than magazines and journals. So I thought I would share some of the bloggers I

This article was originally published by JFlinch on Oct 15, 2009. What tool should I use for solving this problem? What’s the right tool? There are many tools in the toolbox of lean for problem-solving and process improvement. When an organization teaches people to use the tools, there is often

Do you know what your supply chain really costs you? Most companies don’t. They do know how much they spend on suppliers, but that’s just the transaction costs. There are many other true costs in your organization that are affected by the design of your supply chain. The design affects

When does PDCA not apply? Can we say “not here”? Alan Shalloway attempted to address this for the software community in his blog last week. You can read his full post yourself. Apparently many in the software community (but not all, before you call me out on that) feel that

Do you have a starting point for your strategic plans? A very short post today, but I wanted to capture some thoughts on a meeting I was in this weekend. It was the presentation of a long-term plan. When it came to the rationale for the strategic plan, it started