I tell my friends in manufacturing they have it easy. Manufacturing is easy to improve because you can physically see the work. You can follow the flow of material from incoming receiving to shipping. You can watch a part come into a machine or into an assembly station and see the physical transf...

Visual Management is a critical component to Lean Product Development. When I visit organizations I often see teams standing in front of a display board discussing their projects the same way they would in a meeting room. It’s just that they are standing in front of a board. They completely miss the...

Does your company have a continuous improvement strategy for your business and technical processes? Do you use metrics to encourage/measure the usage of lean tools like, K-Briefs, Value Stream Mapping, 5S, Gemba, Standard Work, Plan Do Check Act. The obvious next question is are you seeing the resu...

AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) are now a substantial part of new products across industries – yes including those outside of the consumer internet. AI/ML is helping startups and established firms alike create new product categories. But it is equally helpful on the process side, enhancing program m...

There are many different options and ways to begin a lean journey for you or for your organization - and what is the best way? ...

The idea of "Fail fast" is that many of our ideas will not work, therefore the faster we rip through them, the faster we get to success. Great. But this approach is essentially doing what we do now (only better). Did we ever try to do something we thought would fail? Not so much. We always take the ...

The myths about Agile generally come from two groups. The first, and high in number, are the Agilists who have almost a religious view of ‘Capital A’ Agile. The second group is comprised of more tenured hardware engineers and their managers. They are both wrong, but for different reasons. ...

Be brave! Draw on the strategic import of Lean. Trust in and embrace the people involved. Start a new revolution! Often! Bring back the JOY to peoples working lives. By “joy” I mean doing work which is valuable for the business of the stakeholder, and also brings a feeling of personal and prof...