When I took over maintenance at a struggling facility some years ago, I found a machine rated at 14,000 units per hour running at 10,000. I did the math. At $0.60 spread per unit, that gap was worth $2,400 per hour in recoverable value (throughput accounting). I made promises. I found the money. I fixed the machine. The next week, it ran at 10,000 units per hour. No improvement. The operators told me the machine just couldn't go faster. The material wouldn't allow it. That's

Your inbox isn't just a mess, it's an indictment for how broken your processes are. I talk to leaders routinely who get 150-200 emails a day. If your process software owns routing, approvals, assignments, status, and escalations... what are you doing? It's like taking the parts you need to assemble something useful and mixing them in a big bowl with large quantities of similar looking useless junk. And then obligating yourself to look at everything in the bowl while you try

Lean is irrelevant to your operation right now. Not because it doesn't work. But because if you keep having the same problems, which is where most of industry lives, you have a control problem. And Lean doesn't fix control problems. It hides them. Here's what a control problem looks like: An operator puts the wrong date/label/product/lid/quantity on the wrong box/pallet/product, and now you're scrapping, reworking, or apologizing your way out of another disaster. This happe

Everyone in industry knows Deming's line: "A bad system beats a good person every time." It's true. Systems make success. But systems require a foundation. Without it, they don't work. We can prove this experimentally. Lean is one of the greatest system-building tools ever conceived. And it fails the vast majority of the time. The statistics are clear and supported by thousands of iterations. Why does it fail? Ask the Lean practitioners and they'll tell you: leadership. But i

Most organizations don't have a training system or an accountability system. They have training events and they have punishment events. And, statistically speaking, neither training nor punishment events are very effective. Here's how punishment events work in practice: Wait for disaster. Trace it back to where a standard wasn't followed. Punish to deter recurrence. Nobody was checking that standard before the disaster which is why it happened in the first place. The system o