green belt

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.

Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Additive Manufacturing – it’s a brave new world. Business leaders are focused on high tech and emerging markets. Innovation and automation seem to be the name of the game. Does that mean if your company is not “in” any of these trends, you’ll soon be “out” of business? Perhaps AI and robotics … Read more

In our February blog we provided an overview of Measurement System Analysis for continuous data. Specifically, we explained the TMAC approach to plan and conduct a Gage R&R Study.  Then in our March blog we discussed how to interpret the output from a Gage R&R Study. In addition, we shared insights on how to fix … Read more

Did you know a measurement system error once resulted in a $125M mistake for NASA? It’s true. Back in 1998 NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. After 10 months of travel to the Red Planet the orbiter burned up due to problems with the thrusters. The root cause? The navigation team used the metric system … Read more

TMAC customers contact us periodically to help assess their measurement system. Past examples include a tier-1 supplier for the automotive industry, a tier-1 supplier for a telecommunication company, and a paper manufacturer. A current customer in the healthcare industry is launching a new product and would like to know if their measurement system is reliable. What … Read more

To start the New Year off right we’d like to take a look at blogs written by TMAC staff in 2023. You may have missed reading some of them. Or may just want to give some of them a second read as you get started on your LSS activities for 2024. We started off one … Read more

As we reach the end of our 20th Year of offering Lean Six Sigma services to our customers, I’d like to take a look back at our activities. We started off in January with a trip to the Philadelphia area for a Lean Six Sigma Deployment kaizen event for Align Precision. My colleague Satya Kudapa … Read more

Ever wonder what are the most important keys to project success?  From my experience it boils down to two things: Management Buy-In and Effective Project Management.  The former, Management Buy-In, is environment dependent and outside the scope of this article. However, it has been covered in previous blogs such as this one by my colleague … Read more

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