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.
New content in November includes:
The featured article is actually from our own Evolving Excellence blog, titled
Toyota Kyushu - The Manufacturing Ballet. The following is a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire article here.
I thought I understood lean pretty well. I was wrong. There is still so very much to learn.
On Monday I visited Toyota's Kyushu operations as part of Gemba's Japan Kaikaku Experience. The complex has the capacity to manufacture over 40,000 vehicles per month, did 430,000 vehicles in 2007, and is currently running at a 1,150 vehicle per day clip across two shifts. There are over 6,000 employees, which is down from a few months ago thanks to the global slowdown in vehicle sales, but up from only 2,000 less than a decade ago.
The first thing you notice as you drive up are the bright yellow "smoke" stacks. Why yellow? So they can easily see if the stacks are dirty in order to clean them. The last thing you experience as you leave the facility is the tour guide saying "I'm sure I could do a better job and I will endeavor to be better" and then watching her repeatedly bow to our bus as it drives off, punctuated by a final full bow as we round the corner out of the parking lot... a quarter mile away. The desire to improve and the respect for people is pervasive.
The experience between can be difficult to describe, but here goes with some free-flowing thoughts and observations.
The featured book this month is Real Lean Volume Four - Learning the Craft of Lean Management by Bob Emiliani. The following is a brief summary, click here for more information.
This fourth and final volume of the REAL LEAN series brings Lean full circle. It shows how Lean management is itself a craft that can only be learned as any other craftsman would learn their trade. Few people understand Lean management in the context of a craft, including the best Lean practitioners and Lean thinkers external to Toyota. This unique perspective creates a much clearer impression of what executives need to do in order to become Lean leaders. Their learning must be much deeper than they might have imagined, but the result will be much better than they would have expected.
We added a new group of PowerPoint training presentations covering several Lean Enterprise topics.
- Lean Accounting
- Lean & Six Sigma Design
- Lean Leadership
- Lean & Green
- Lean Project Management
- Lean Sales & Marketing
- Lean Supply Chains
- Hoshin Planning & Policy Deployment
We also added a Lean Enterprise Assessment, which looks at 40 criteria covering the Leadership, People, Infrastructure, and Tools/Processes aspects of the lean enterprise. More information here.
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.
- Virtual Factory Tours: Web and streaming video tours of over 100 factories.
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.