Guide
Insights on lean, processes and change.
18 of 40 articles
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 suggestion box is where good ideas die
Your people have ideas. They write them down, post them and never hear of them again. After the third time, they stop. That is how a plant loses its most valuable source of improvement.
Production versus sales. Why the wall between departments costs so much
Sales promises, production complains, the customer waits. This conflict is not a character problem but a system fault. And it can be fixed.
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.
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.
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.
The first workshop with an external facilitator: what you may expect
The first day with someone from outside decides between trust and scepticism in the plant. What a good first workshop delivers, what it deliberately does not, and how to tell by the evening.
The board is up, the numbers are right, nobody looks
Every week the board is updated, and every week the shift walks straight past it. A board nobody stands in front of is wallpaper. What it lacks is not a better KPI.
"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.