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[Simon]

I woke up this morning with an idea, now I don't know if it's mine or someone else's but I thought I would share it with you anyway.

It's a simple way of measuring how lean your organisation is against the seven wastes. It needs further work to develop the audit checklists for each of the seven wastes but it's a good start - well I think so anyway.

Now you can spend a couple of days on the internet (at SaferPak) and then tell your boss you did this.

Let me know what you think.

 Lean_check_up.xls   31.5KB   165 downloads

Regards,
Simon

[Simon]

I don't know about you but I'm reading more than I ever did these days -- mostly on the internet. Over the last couple of years I've part read 5 or 6 books (remember them), but for various reasons I haven't got round to finishing any. Henry Fords Lean Vision - Enduing Principles from the First Ford Motor Plantby William A. Levinson is one such book I've been meaning to read and thankfully I've had the time to dust it off recently. There's no doubting Henry Ford was an amazing visionary and he pioneered many of the modern day manufacturing techniques, quality tools as well as ethical labour practices - however good, he must also have been absolutely ruthless. An interesting book and a very interesting man.

Here are a couple of quotes from page 188 of the book:

'The idea of eliminating waste is obvious, but it is very easy to look straight at waste (e.g. run in slag, paint that misses fountain pen caps) without seeing it. One of Henry Ford's success secrets was the ability to see waste that most people would overlook. Watch the hole (everything that the process consumes or discards) as well as the doughnut (product).'

'Do not take any aspect of a job or activity for granted. Never assume that, just because people have done a job a certain way for months, years, or decades, that there isn't a far better way of doing it.'

Plain obvious now but in the early 20th century?

If anyone is interested I will post more snippets.

Regards,
Simon