Guide
Practical Lean guide
9 of 40 articles
The most expensive machine in the hall stands still the most
The new machine was supposed to solve everything. Now it stands still more than it runs, and nobody can say why. Usually it is not the machine but everything that happens around it.
"We have always done it this way" is the most expensive sentence in the plant
The sentence comes up in every meeting, every hall, every office. It sounds like defiance, but it is usually something else. Whoever hears it correctly gets further than with any argument.
What new plant managers almost always get wrong in the first weeks
The new plant manager wants to show quickly that he has arrived. That is precisely the mistake. The first weeks are decided not by what you do, but by what you find out.
Delivery date promised, delivery date missed. What is really behind it
The customer calls, the date is gone, production gets the call. Yet the date was already lost before the first chip fell. Where delivery reliability actually comes from.
Your warehouse tells you the truth about your processes
Inventory is a frozen decision. Every shelf, every buffer stock, every piece of dead stock tells you where a process is not working. You only have to be able to read what it says.
Email is not a process
When an order wanders through eight inboxes, there is no workflow, only hope. How to recognise where your office is run by email, and what you need instead.
Why your best people resign inwardly before they say it out loud
The inner resignation begins long before the letter of resignation, and it begins with the people you least want to lose. The signals, the causes and what you can still do.
When everyone is in charge of everything, nobody is responsible
"We all do that together" sounds like team spirit and ends in tasks left undone. Why shared responsibility is not accountability, and how you change that.
The ten minutes of shift handover that shape a whole shift
One shift leaves, the other arrives, in between a handshake and half a sentence. What is lost in these minutes, the night shift never makes up. How to design a handover that holds.