Each month new articles, book reviews, and other content are added to the Superfactory website. The new content is featured in the monthly e-newsletter which goes out to 50,000 subscribers worldwide, and we will also post a monthly heads-up on this blog.
One brief announcement this month: for the last ten years the Superfactory website, and more recently the Evolving Excellence blog, have been operated by Superfactory Ventures LLC.
Over the last couple years the other services offered by the company have been expanding, so now it is time to rename the company to something more descriptive: Factory Strategies Group LLC. The Superfactory website and Evolving Excellence blog will stay the same (like it or not!), but you can visit FSG to see our manufacturing consulting and assessment services. On a final note, you'll notice that the core of our logo is a person. This is because we passionately believe that the heart of a factory, and a lean transformation, is the knowledge and creativity of people.
New content in August includes:
The featured article is from Bob Emiliani and is titled
Attention: We Can Stop Making the Same Mistake Now. The following is a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire article here.
Having now recognized the importance of the “Respect for People” principle in Lean management, the Lean community is now more focused than ever on trying to change senior managers’ behaviors. However, efforts to change their behaviors in support of new, progressive management practices has, for several decades, largely fallen flat. Knowing this fact should motivate us to re-think the problem and identify processes that are more effective at changing leadership behaviors.
Wouldn’t it be great if top managers could easily see the wide-ranging benefits of Lean management and the vast array of improvements and human and organizational capability-building that are possible? If they could see it, then you would think that they would rush to change their leadership behaviors in order to secure the gains for the business and its stakeholders as soon as possible. But as we all know, this rarely happens. The usual outcome is for executives to take the business down the Lean path with little or no change in their leadership behaviors.
The featured book this month is Lean Hospitals by fellow lean blogger Mark Graban. The following is a brief summary, click here for more information.
Drawing on his years of working with hospitals, Mark Graban explains why and how lean can be used to improve safety, quality, and efficiency in a healthcare setting. After highlighting the benefits of lean methods for patients, employees, physicians, and the hospital itself, he explains how lean manufacturing staples such as Value Stream Mapping and process observation can help hospital personnel identify and eliminate waste in their own processes, effectively preventing delays for patients, reducing wasted motion for caregivers, and improving the quality of care.
We continually update the other major sections of the website, including:
- PowerPoint Presentations: Over 50 downloadable PowerPoint presentations on lean manufacturing, quality, enterprise, and safety concepts.
- Factory Toolbox: Almost 300 downloadable forms, procedure templates, assessments, and tools to help you not reinvent the wheel.
- Events Calendar: a listing of lean excellence seminars, workshops, training, and conferences worldwide
- Topic Information: Summaries and resources on over 40 enterprise excellence topics.
- Online E-Learning Center: Fourteen interactive online presentations on the core concepts of lean manufacturing.
- Tools and Assessments: Downloadable assessment tools.
- Virtual Factory Tours: Web and streaming video tours of over 100 factories.
The Superfactory 20 list of companies with strong lean manufacturing programs was released, and the
stock performance of each of those companies is being tracked individually and as a group versus the S&P500. Last year these companies outperformed the S&P500 by 20%... this year it isn't quite as hot. Yet. Check out the list and performance, updated hourly.
For all you LinkedIn junkies, we have created a LinkedIn group for Superfactory. Join the group to
network with other Superfactory enthusiasts and to show our logo on your profile. If you haven't explored LinkedIn, check it out to see why over 17 million professionals use it for networking.
We are always looking for new articles and other content. Contact us via the Superfactory website if you would like to contribute to our knowledge base.