Imagine watching an 800-meter race. The athletes start at the sound of the gun. They ramp up in speed hitting their targetted speed on the first straightaway. During their turns, their speeds adjust due to rubbing shoulders, moving lanes, or taking strategic chances to improve their performance. You might even see one athlete slightly slowing down due to a hamstring tightening up. Within this race example, we can add many more influencers of speed. But in manufacturing, what

Last week I heard the birds chirping in my yard indicating to me that spring was in the air. All of this season’s snow had melted proclaiming the yard work needed in the flowerbeds. Excited and eager to embrace the change in the seasons, we had another snowstorm. Approximately 8 inches fell in less than 24 hours. Not a big storm, but not a gentle dusting. However, it required a clean-up. As I was out shoveling, hoping it would be the last of the season, I got to thinking abou

There are plenty of tools to conduct investigations within manufacturing. Some can be solved with a 5-why or an Ishikawa diagram. Others may require applying regimented knowledge of using a Red X™ approach. Regardless of the tool, these investigations are destined to find the multitude of root causes and to identify ways to prevent reoccurrence. But what are those triggers? In a recent @Op_Empathy blog post, we reflected on these investigations as investments and discussed wa

My zipper broke on my winter jacket the other day and I was able to contact the manufacturer, work through a claim, and have it repaired. A friend recently purchased their first smart thermostat and used the manufacturer’s support line to make sure it was installed correctly. Within manufacturing organizations, who do we contact when there's a problem with one of our projects or the tracking of its value? Who can we rely on to provide encouraging and non-judgmental feedback o

Regardless of whether you have production units that are reliable or unreliable, I would like to propose a different type of performance indicator for manufacturing leaders to consider from the standpoint of an “investment.” For this blog, I want to challenge you to think of a planned outage or scheduled maintenance, as if it was a baseball card to be traded. I will trade you my twelve hours of production time for twelve hours of scheduled downtime to maintenance on our asset