Lean Recalls – Compromising Safety?

Is there ever a time when risk outweighs the real fix?   As we are quickly learning from the latest news regarding Toyota’s proclaimed “savings” through limited safety recalls, the answer is “NO”.  The details of the story surrounding Toyota’s knowledge of the mounting safety concerns and the Toyota’s defense is very disturbing.  Toyota has responded by stating “Our first priority is the safety of […]

Lean, OEE, and How to beat the “Law of Diminishing Returns”

Are your lean initiatives falling prey to the Law of Diminishing Returns?  Waning returns may soon be followed by apathy as the “new” initiative gets old.  For those who have not studied economics or are not familiar with the term, it is defined by Wikepedia as follows: The law states “that we will get less and less extra output when we add additional […]

Lean Execution – Excel Site Update

For those of you who are looking to expand your knowledge of Excel, improve your skills, or wish to develop an application in VBA, we have added Ron DeBruin’s web site to our Excel page.  Ron presents some very useful solutions to what could otherwise be some very difficult problems.  We trust you will find the link leads to some very practical solutions for […]

Quality is Priceless

The price tag for Toyota’s recent recall campaigns is estimated to be more than $2 Billion and the loss in share holder value is likely many times more than this.  Yet we remain optimistic and anticipate that Toyota will make it through this crisis.  We can only imagine what this kind of money could buy if wasn’t spent on repairing vehicles. In our […]

Toyota Recall: Quality versus Quantity!

There has been much speculation about what went wrong and what is still right at Toyota.   It has even been suggested that Toyota may have become blinded by the desire to be the number 1 automaker in the world.  This suggests that quality and quantity are interelated and that one will suffer at the expense of the other.  We would argue that this is simply not true in this […]

Toyota: Managing Nightmares

The Nightmare Toyota continues to be plagued by recalls.  The current acceleration issues (either floor mats or “sticky” accelerators), braking issues on the Prius Hybrid, and now reports in the USA of steering problems with 2009 and 2010 Corollas.  While the majority of the news reports focus on the next steps to repair faulty vehicles, the real nightmare is the human tragedy that was and may still be […]

Lean Analytics and a little TRIZ

We are encouraged to see a significantly increasing interest in lean and agile strategy.  As we have emphasized in previous posts, the culture and work environment are as critical to the success of your initiatives as are the specific techniques, methods, and / or technologies that you will choose to use.  One of our favorite phrases to put our work environment into perspective […]