OE Newsletters Archives

OE Newsletters

Titleist Foot-Joy Worldwide Drives Toward Visual Workplace #31 OE Newsletter

With lean manufacturing, how much difference can a handful of people make, armed with know-how, some adhesive tape, a laminating machine, and rolls of Velcro?

MEMC Gets Quick, Cost-Effective Maintenance Improvements with CEDAC #30 OE Newsletter

Reduced downtime. Greater capacity. Increased yield. Higher revenues. According to Darrell Birks, maintenance supervisor at MEMC Electronic Materials (St. Peter's, MO), you can get all this quickly, simply and with minimal expense.

‘Semi-Stealth’ Strategy Turns Top Executives into Believers #29 OE Newsletter

You want to transform your company into a lean enterprise, but you don't have top management support. What do you do?

Good Team Chartering Means Better Results #28 OE Newsletter

"Team chartering" (often referred to as "project chartering")– what it is, why it is important and the elements that go into a great charter.

At Last – A CEO Who Walks the Quality Talk #27 OE Newsletter

Leadership is the first of “six commandments” underpinning a successful total-quality strategy. The other five: focusing on customer results, training all employees, recognizing employee participation, communicating quality throughout the organization, and providing appropriate quality measures and tools.

Making Empowerment Real: Four Steps Managers Must Take #26 OE Newsletter

Communicating clear goals is the first step managers must take to assure that empowerment works. Managers must also provide the skills to achieve the goals, time to work on improvement, and resources with which people can make changes.

Managers Have 3 Obligations in a Lean System #25 OE Newsletter

As a manager, Lean production obliges you to:
Be a good teacher - Be a consensus builder - Have a shop-floor focus...

Finding Capacity – A snapshot of a client engagement #24 OE Newsletter

Applying lean thinking outside the manufacturing environment can bring big returns to your organization. Recently, we employed lean techniques to assist an organization with a major capital project—our mission, finding 30% more capacity within their existing facility. Here’s a snapshot of the engagement.

TPM Stakeholder Roles and Responsibilities #23 OE Newsletter

When we were thinking of a topic for this issue of our Operational Excellence Newsletter, I had just completed a conversation with the maintenance manager of an electronics firm who was interested in getting a Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) program started at his facility. He asked if I could provide him with some information on stakeholder roles in a TPM effort to help him “sell” the program internally.

Make it Visible… #22 OE Newsletter

Last month saw another round of graduates from our Lean Manager for Services Certification held on the campus of The Ohio State University. Instructor and Executive Partner of Productivity Inc., Catherine Converset, spent a few minutes with us recently to talk about implementing lean in service and administrative functions.