Do you receive hundreds of emails a day? Are you spending more and more time reading and responding? How can Lean help you deal with the flood? Lean Principle: Standardized Work Dan Markowitz, Lean Enterprise Institute faculty member, discusses how the Lean principle Standardized Work can be used to tame the email flood in a [...]
Online ordering has continued to rapidly increase, particularly over the last year. How can one fulfill orders and keep the customer satisfied? We’ll hear from three sources about intelligent order fulfillment. First, from HighJump (now Körber), a company that provides integrated systems for warehouse, transportation, and logistics that helps large organizations address eCommerce orders. Craig Moore, [...]
When constructing control charts with subgroups, there are two sources of variation: between subgroups and within subgroups. Standard Shewhart Xbar-R or S charts assume that the within subgroup variation is dominant. But that is not always the case. When that assumption is violated, what should be done? In an earlier blog, we discussed control chart [...]
So, you have a key employee with years of experience in their position. They are leaving the company. What have you done to make a smooth transition to the next person to fill that job? Sadly, the answer is often little or nothing. Let’s take a closer look at the position transition, also known more [...]
Time and motion studies have been around for well over a hundred years. Based on the foundational work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, they are as relevant today whenever repetitive work is performed by humans. Set firmly in the discipline of industrial engineering, we’ll explore time and motion studies by a [...]
Bootstrap Resampling takes an initial sample and randomly samples from that repeatedly with replacement. One then uses the data from the resamples to estimate various statistics. Bootstrap Resampling should be in your statistical toolkit. We will explore the Bootstrap approach from various sources. First, Mike Marin, Professor at the University of British Columbia clearly explains [...]
There are many methods for making multi-objective decisions described in Lean Six Sigma and other disciplines. Benjamin Franklin developed a simple but effective one. In 1772, Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen, had an important decision to make that had several advantages and disadvantages. He turned to his friend, Benjamin Franklin for help. In the [...]
What is a Digital Twin? Why is it more than simulation? How will it revolutionize design, development, and operation of products and systems? While a simulation is defined as “… an approximate imitation of the operation of a process or system that represents its operation over time.” - Wikipedia. A digital twin is defined as [...]
It’s the time of year when many make New Year’s resolutions. But how many people keep them? What do experts say we can do to make our resolutions stick? We’ll learn from two: Dr. Michael Evans – Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Toronto, who also works with Apple to design new ways [...]
Almost five months after World War I began, and after close to a million lives had been lost, an impromptu truce took place around Christmas. Called the Christmas Truce, learn about what took place never to happen again. It began on Christmas Eve 1914 when British and German troops started singing Christmas carols to each [...]
