FIELD NOTES
Short reads on lean, operations and leading change, written for people who run plants, not people who write about them.
FEATURED · TECHNOLOGY & AI
You can’t throw a new system over a poorly managed process and expect great results. Lean is the foundation the next industrial revolution sits on.
Kaizen is the practice of making small, continuous improvements to how work gets done, every day, by everyone. Like Kung Fu, it’s a discipline you train rather than a project you finish: stay curious, make problems visible, go see the work, and keep at it long after the first win.
For most manufacturers, the biggest cyber risks are phishing, malware and ransomware, and many breaches start on the shop floor. The basics go a long way: train everyone, protect connected IIoT devices, get regular third-party security audits, and pursue CMMC if you supply the Department of Defense.
The 1964 Tokyo Olympic pictograms show how much information a simple visual can carry across language barriers. The same idea powers visual management in Lean: icons, colors and simple signals let anyone on the floor understand the status of work at a glance.
Longevity comes from changing and adapting. This Old House has stayed on the air for more than 40 seasons by evolving from planers and wood framing to apprentices, CNC routers and smart homes. Businesses and careers last the same way.
We were recently featured on the Gemba Academy podcast with Ron Pereira. In this episode, Nik Kottha shares the importance of having
Weak metrics measure activity instead of results, or try to measure everything at once. Strong metrics are a short list of indicators tied to what your customers and your business actually care about, chosen so you can see trouble coming before it hits.
A good business coach or consultant gives you an outside view you can’t get from inside your own operation. They spot problems you’ve gone blind to, get you unstuck, help teams brainstorm across silos, develop your people and turn long-term vision into a plan with metrics.
You build a culture of change by making improvement everyone’s job: encourage new ideas at every level, challenge “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” and recognize the people who go beyond expectations. Culture won’t shift overnight, but these three habits start the move.
Top Shops win on people, not just machines. The best machine shops invest heavily in their employees, build trust from day one and get real buy-in, so improvement programs like Lean are embraced instead of resisted.
Value-added work is anything a customer would willingly pay for. Rework, extra transport, waiting and errors are waste, whether you make parts, run a bank or run a hospital. Mapping a process step by step makes that waste visible so you can remove it.
FREE · PRINTABLE
The same form I use on client floors, plus a one-page guide to running your own 30-minute waste walk this week. Print it, grab a supervisor, go.
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