Kaizen and private equity

The current issue of Businessweek has an interesting profile of a Monomoy Capital Partners, a private equity firm with about $700 million in investments (My Week at Private Equity Boot Camp, Apr 26). Private equity deals are not the normal focus of this blog, but the article highlights an intriguing aspect of how Monomoy goes about [...]

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Making more planes

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story on process changes at Boeing that aim to produce more 737s without having to expand the size of their Renton, Washington, factory (Boeing Teams Speed Up 737 Output, Feb 7). The scale of what they are trying to do is pretty impressive. Workers here recently boosted 737 [...]

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Toyota rethinks the assembly line

It is hard to feel sorry for Toyota. It is a mammoth corporation and a force in its industry. Still the Japanese automaker has been going through a rough stretch. Some of its problems are surely of its own making (e.g., quality issues and recalls), but others are largely beyond its control (e.g., turmoil in the world [...]

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Preventing problems in health care

Much has been written about applying operations management techniques — many developed in manufacturing environments — to health care settings. Indeed, this has been a regular topic in this blog. One thing that has been missing from this discussion has been a view of preventing errors through better design. When making things, the argument goes [...]

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Lean operations for luxury bags

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on how Louis Vuitton is relying on operations to support its growth (At Vuitton, Growth in Small Batches, Jun 27). The brand has grown significantly and is now significantly bigger than rivals such as Gucci. That raises some interesting challenges as it tries to keep up its growth [...]

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Adding inventories to supply chains

When article opens like this, it piques my interest: The just-in-time approach to manufacturing, which has swept the world’s factories over the past two decades, has made a virtue out of keeping inventories lean. But some manufacturers think it has gone too far, and that having a little extra padding might be a healthier option. [...]

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Kaizen and cloud computing for agriculture

Here is a curious article from the Wall Street Journal (Japanese Farms Look to the ‘Cloud‘, Jan 18). On the one hand, it is a novel application of “manufacturing logic” and some serious analytics. On the other, it seems the article was written with buzzword bingo in mind. The setting in question is Japanese agriculture, [...]

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Making coffins and the human side of lean ops

Having been at this blog for a while, I have come to recognize that there is a class of articles that should be filed under “Lean Ops: Who’d of thought?”.  For example, all one has to do is a quick Google news search to come up with an article that essentially asks “Can the Toyota [...]

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Processes vs. Firefighting

We have yet to post anything about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Obviously, something went wrong there but it has not been clear what the link to operations is. A report on NPR last night, however, points to something in the way that BP generally runs its business in comparison to another [...]

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Applying lean ops to health care

This Sunday, the New York Times had an interesting article on applying lean operations to health care (Factory Efficiency Comes to the Hospital, Jul 11). The story focuses on Seattle Children’s Hospital and the examples range from managing inventory to improving patient flow: On a busy day last month in the I.C.U., it took [nurse [...]

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