Software applications exist to perform a wide variety of tasks and for any given task there are many applications to choose from.  As anyone who has visited an “App Store” knows, the number of available applications can range from a select few to thousands.  Your performance criteria provide a means of selecting the best application for you or your company. […]

“Use the Index Luke” is the free to read on-line version of the book “SQL Performance Explained“. If the book is free, why even mention the official “SQL Performance Explained” title for the hard copy? There are two primary reasons for purchasing a copy for my library. One is having a version of my own […] via SQL Performance Explained — […]

Lean has been around for a long time and the naming was not Toyota’s idea. The proof of wisdom is in the results. I don’t sell “lean” per se. I am a change agent with a proven track record that speaks for itself. Taking a company out of the red and into the black in a matter of months can’t […]

Timing is everything. A good stop watch is one of the tools any lean practitioner will have close at hand.

I recently purchased an iPhone 6 Plus and decided to browse the App Store to see if I could find a good stop watch app.

…. And I did.

I upgraded to TechSmith’s Camtasia version 9 today and note some very nice improvements that make producing videos with Camtasia so much faster and easier.  Recording, editing, and creating your video is a simple process, even for novice users.  You can save or share your videos by uploading them to Screencast.com, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, and more. It is so much easier […]

OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness continues to pervade the world of manufacturing as evidenced by the number of OEE templates that are downloaded each and every day from our downloads page.  In this regard, it is interesting to note the number of OEE solutions that operate in complete isolation. A medium to large sized company typically deploys some form of […]

The value of a solution is a problem not worth repeating. ~Versalytics.org The 5 Why process is one of the many tools that serve to help us to state a given problem, identify a root cause, and ultimately derive a solution to resolve the concern. One of the caveats that potentially undermines the effectiveness of the 5 Why process is repeatability. […]

Databases are capable of storing incredible volumes of data.  However, their true value is found when we learn to mine and manipulate that data.  Structured Query Language or SQL is the language of databases and is common – with some exceptions – to all of the major databases on the market today. A custom front end is typical of most […]

Microsoft’s SQL Server is the database solution of choice for our company.  However, like many of the database solutions available, additional data mining tools are required to provide the top level reports needed to manage the business itself. Not surprisingly, one of those tools is Excel 2016.  The correlation between a database table and a spreadsheet is intuitively clear.  While […]