By Art Smalley This article is from the Superfactory Archives, an archive of content from the Superfactory website that existed from 1997 to 2012.…

There are two large lean-oriented Yahoo Group message boards, Bill Kluck's NWLean and Shahrukh Irani's JSLean. NWLean was originally started i…

Over the past decade we've witnessed the rapid maturing of Asian and Indian industrial companies from simple low labor cost assembly operations to…

If there weren't so many real lives damaged, reading the stuff Alfred Sloan and Walter Reuther wrote back in the 1950's would be almost comica…

Most lean efforts begin with middle management (you know, the people with 'bad attitudes' that usually get the blame for lean failures ... fun…

I have to put in a plug for a new book called JIT Is Flow by Hiroyuki Hirano. In the interest of full disclosure, yeah, I had a small hand in editing…

Walmart's business model has long been biased against American manufacturers. They have forced American companies to compete on Asian producers…

So you think manufacturing productivity is way up, do you? Think again. Every genius from those employed by the government to the academic community…