A conglomerate, by definition, is a large corporation with diversified product lines , owned and run by the same management. Danaher, a smaller but very profitable conglomerate with a diverse range of manufacturing businesses, has a very different set of strengths; it applies its distinctive lean production system to a variety of product sectors, often through companies that it acquires and then transforms. MORE

Japan is famous for its lean production systems and efficient supply chains. Large companies such as Toyota and Sony were forced to halt production not because of damage to their own factories, which were quickly checked and ready to go back online, but because they were dependent on a small number of parts from suppliers in Tohoku. I returned to Tokyo from Kansai late last week, burdened with about 20 liters of water. MORE

He didn’t do it by making cars shoddier or offshoring production to low-wage countries. His secret was mass production in a “focused factory,” using interchangeable parts, specialization, and the assembly line. Health India Operations Productivity MORE

This was the original purpose of forming corporations — to facilitate the production of products and services with the least amount of wasted time, materials, and labor. Since the late nineteenth century, we have seen five distinct movements in the way companies compete. MORE

By sheer happenstance, I had just gotten a copy of Gemba Walks , a collection of essays by James Womack , a co-author of the automotive classic The Machine That Changed The World and a pioneering importer of Toyota-inspired lean production insights and methodologies to America. MORE

It involves replacing traditional mass manufacturing with “lean manufacturing” principles. In addition to improved product quality and delivery times, the lean approach has been linked to improved terms of employment. MORE

The market rewards each of us according to our actual productive value, he insisted : "To each agent a distinguishable share in production, and to each a corresponding reward &38212; such is the natural law of distribution." Does production really work this way? MORE

The Toyota Way Jeffrey Liker McGraw-Hill (2003) To understand Toyota’s success, first understand its DNA I read this book when it was first published in 2004 and recently re-read it, curious to know how well Jeffrey Liker’s explanation of Toyota’s management principles and lean production values have held up. MORE

When is it possible to predict a product’s success? How you answer this question may be the most important factor in how you design your product development process — and, ultimately, in whether your business succeeds or fails. Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products? Outcomes will usually be much worse than predicted, and we will waste design, production, and distribution resources. Product development MORE

The most important way to mitigate risk is to become excellent at either engineering, product, selling, or operations and management. One option is to build expertise before founding a company: ask VCs and others in the startup community to recommend the most competent people they know — heads of engineering, sales, product, and operations — and look for a job working directly under them. “I’m so glad we read that case — I’m NEVER going to start a company.”. MORE

costs by using practices commonly associated with mass production and lean production. A renowned Indian heart surgeon is currently building a 2,000-bed, internationally accredited “health city” in the Cayman Islands, a short flight from the U.S. MORE

Technologies like 3-D printing, robotics, advanced motion controls, and new methods for continuous manufacturing hold great potential for improving how companies design and build products to better serve customers. Their younger average fleet age gives them a more competitive product. MORE

Liker, author of esteemed lean production manual The Toyota Way decided he should again focus on Toyota’s cultural efforts, but this time with a bit of a twist. I ran the Shelter Bay 10K yesterday. Hot day. 5:30 start. Slow time (54:58) put me right at 50% of the men that ran. MORE

More and more companies are adopting software and product development frameworks like Agile , Scrum , and Kanban — which promote quick, iterative, lean production — to deliver higher quality products, faster. Collaboration Leading teams Productivity MORE

Moreover, this isn’t always about coming up with new products and services. We tend to think of a shiny new product offering when we picture “strategic innovation,” but that’s too limited. How GE Applies Lean Startup Practices. MORE

They created and maintained a close connection to frontline staff — what Jim Womack , the expert in lean production and thinking, calls “going to gemba ” — Japanese for “the actual place.”. In August, Dr. Donald M. MORE

Just as the "quality" and "lean production" movements of the 80s and 90s required quality to be designed — rather than inspected — in, innovators have got to demonstrate greater ingenuity and integrity around how they integrate real-world testing into their projects and processes. Just as with quality and lean, this turns out to be a cultural, organizational and technical challenge. MORE

They ignore the realities of how global manufacturing now works — how it has evolved into a complex network of interlinked factories that together build many of the products sold today. Generally, what we see is the country where the final assembly of a product took place. MORE

In the 1980s, our organizations learned a great deal about how to improve productivity, quality, and costs from Japanese practices. If they were, employers might hire them instead of leaning on their data scientists for insights and context they aren’t equipped to deliver. MORE

The dynamic is always the same, whether the idea in question is reengineering, six-sigma quality, or lean production systems: A genuinely original strategy is born in one company or industry, consultants discover the practice and turn it into a marketable commodity, executives in all sorts of other companies race to "buy" the product — and then they wonder why the technique didn't work nearly as well in their organization as it did in the place that created it in the first place. MORE

Many developing-country firms, even while trying to implement new techniques like Lean Management, ignore the fact that labor is different from other "inputs." in some of the other areas of management we examined, such as careful monitoring, lean production, and sensible targets. After a decade of painstaking research, we have concluded that American firms are on average the best managed in the world. MORE