Several years ago I started practicing what I preach, at least when it comes to making better use of data in my business. What did I do that was so radical? I started using control charts to track my key business metrics. Imagine that! We set up a simple data entry process that my controller [...]

Recently I met with my friend and board member, Dennis Blyly. While he is quick to point out he is not a macro-economic expert,  Dennis is a very smart guy with his fingers on the pulse of a lot of businesses.  Dennis brings a really useful 50,000 foot view of the economy. We were discussing [...]

With all the economic doom and gloom in the main stream media, let's take time to celebrate Del Monte Foods' Third Quarter Earnings report, which boasts a 14% profit increase for the third quarter. In a Del Monte Foods press release, Richard G. Wolford, Chairman and CEO of Del Monte Foods, said the company's aggressive [...]

Over the years I've had many conversations with people who own or run plastics molding companies. Persistently I've heard them say: "We don't worry too much about scrap because we can always regrind it. It's not waste."I've always found myself stuttering in response to that.On the one hand, it seems obvious to me that any [...]

Ron Pereira over at LSS Academy wrote a great post about the Japanese phrase Genchi Genbutsu. He quotes Jon Miller, a Lean consultant who is also fluent in Japanese, as translating genchi genbutsu to "actual place, actual thing". Pereira's post caught my attention because he opened with this quote from the father of the Toyoto [...]

One of the discussion forums I try to monitor is Elsmar Cove. Sometimes it goes pretty geeky (I'm sorry, its just the word that comes to mind.) But sometimes it has some great questions. Here is one from that 'Shesha' posted today. Hi, Just wanted to know, what are the different methods you all had [...]

Since starting this blog, I've been tapping into a variety of lean / quality / continuous improvement blogs. It's one way to connect with other people around the world, and keep from isolating myself. I set up Google Reader so I can check all of the blogs from one site, and it takes only a [...]

Since writing the series of posts about calculating OEE, I've been thinking about how you can best use OEE data to drive improvements in throughput and profitability. Recently I showed this OEE Dashboard to a customer. He said to me, "Evan, this is exactly what I'm looking for. Today we're collecting OEE data on paper [...]

If you're just tuning in, this post is part of a series aimed to summarize Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) in clear, unambiguous language. This series started a few days ago with comments about a feature story in Industry Week magazine about OEE. We've been working our way across the formula for OEE: OEE = Availability [...]

In my last post I began digging into the details of calculating OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). The formula for calculating OEE is straightforward: OEE = Availability * Performance * Quality But each of these key components relies on some standard operating definitions. In the last post we looked behind the scenes at Availability. This post [...]