Take your Career to the Next Level
By Caroline Lewis If AI gave your workforce 20-40% more capacity, what would you do with it? That is the question Ingka Group, IKEA’s largest retailer and franchisee, faced in 2021 when the company adopted an AI chatbot to handle routine customer questions. Rather than responding to the AI-driven changes in customer service with layoffs, … Read more
by Travis Pranshcke My grandfather used to tell me, “Get all the knowledge you can. Not pieces of paper that say you know it, but actual knowledge of how to accomplish things.” He would remind me that jobs, money, and possessions can all be lost, but knowledge stays with you. At the time, I didn’t … Read more
by Eric Thompson As Green Belts and Black Belts, your role in Lean Six Sigma is more than just applying statistical tools and the DMAIC methodology. Success depends on how well you lead teams, facilitate change, and bring out the best in people—in other words, your People Skills. Some practitioners are naturally gifted in this … Read more
by Jim Logan Again this month, we welcome back Jim Logan, a TMAC customer who has worked in a variety of manufacturing industries including automotive, aerospace, oil & gas, medical devices, and high-precision semiconductor equipment. While he has primarily worked in management over the past 15 years, he is equally adept in a technical setting. … Read more
by Marcia Garcia Rios When I started working in quality management at a medical device company a couple of years ago, I thought my job was mostly about optimizing equipment settings, adjusting production lines, and writing long protocols. I pictured myself tweaking machines, running experiments, and making processes more efficient. But what I quickly realized … Read more
Becoming a LSS Green Belt or Black Belt takes a major investment of time and money. It starts with 2-4 months of training followed by additional months of leading a project team, collecting and analyzing data, determining root causes, running a pilot, and implementing a solution. The results speak for themselves, with sizeable impacts to … Read more
Did you know the number of people working from home tripled from 2019 to 2021? According to the U. S. Census Bureau the number of employees primarily working from home went from ~9M to 27.6M workers during this period. That’s roughly equivalent to all the people – men, women, and children – in Colorado, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kentucky combined!
Whether your organization is on a lean journey or planning one, aligning management and the workforce with understanding and acceptance can be a challenge. Lean promises shortened lead times, less waste, and more productive operations. But for many companies the results achieved have fallen short. There is growing consensus in the lean community that a narrow focus on lean tools without providing the workforce with continuous improvement skills will result in poor results if not outright failure.
In Part 1 of this blog Wiff Dedrick shared the story of how he helped grow a toner cartridge remanufacturing company from $3M to $16M in annual sales over a ~five-year period. But the company had issues with profitability and excess inventory. Click here to read Part 1 of the blog. In Part 2 Wiff … Read more
Below is a tale of my journey as a young manager going through the enterprise transformation process as I know it, our Lean conversion, and the key lessons I learned. After graduating from the University of Texas in Austin in 1993, I moved to Dallas to join one of my friends in helping his business … Read more
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