Most manufacturers implement Lean too early. And it costs them. If you need to improve now, do not implement Lean. When a plant is under pressure to improve, the instinct is to reach for Lean. Kaizen events. Value stream mapping. 5S blitzes. It looks like action. It feels like progress. But plants that are under pressure to improve have something in common: they always have known problems they aren't solving. And if you have problems you aren't successfully solving, the pro

Most leaders think about errors one at a time. One mistake → one fix. Done. But that's not how it works on the plant floor or anywhere else people execute complex work under pressure. Every error you DON'T prevent creates the conditions for many more. Here's how: A team member skips a verification step. The product gets made wrong. Now you have rework. Rework eats time, disrupts the schedule, and puts people in a state of rushing. Maybe not just your facility, maybe materials

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

I recently received a DM asking what 180 OPEX actually does. We fix process compliance problems. So what's a process compliance problem? That's when habits, convenience, distraction or disinterest at any level derail success because your team isn't in full alignment with your process. Now, there are really 3 ways to be out of alignment with the process: 1) Complacency - We don't follow the process because we don't think it's important (or it's inconvenient and nobody cares

And why the difference between the two always compounds Every plant manager has watched it happen. A changeover gets rushed at the start of second shift. The operator swaps the change parts but doesn't verify something critical. Maybe it's a standard that's been written down, maybe it's not. The line runs for forty minutes before someone notices there's something wrong (bottles dented, labels crooked, wrong materials, wrong print, etc). Now there's a quality hold, a financial

"A bad system will beat a good person every time." - Deming We've all seen the stats, they're clear: 70–90% of Lean, Six Sigma, and TPM implementations fail. The process excellence community's explanation: Leadership. "Superficial commitment." "Treats lean as a toolbox, not a culture." "Weak supervisors." "Doesn't give the floor a voice." The objective function is: We said do this and it didn't happen. It must be the leader's fault. But we already know that weak operational s

Lean is arguably one of the most powerful and comprehensive frameworks for process improvement ever developed. Yet, studies show that 70-95% of Lean initiatives fail to sustain gains, often ending up costing more than they deliver. Applying Lean without the right groundwork completed can actually hinder progress rather than help it. And without the right prerequisites in place, Lean will fail every time. How does that happen? Lean is celebrated for a reason, it’s transformati