Lean management or agile? The right answer may be both

Lean management or agile? The right answer may be both

Has there even been a time when customers were more demanding of the companies serving them? Industry 4.0 technologies—many barely imaginable only a decade ago—have already enabled genuine breakthroughs in cost, convenience, and customization, creating extraordinary value for buyers while raising the performance bar for producers ever higher. And then there’s the volatility that never entirely disappears,…

Manage Your Suppliers’ Internal Defects

Manage Your Suppliers’ Internal Defects

As a manufacturer, we want our defects rate to be as close as possible to the “Six Sigma level, 3.4 defects per million opportunities” (DPMO) on products we fabricate.  A possibly overlooked key is how we manage our suppliers’ defects; what they do with the recovered contents off the parts we reject and return to…

Operational Excellence in a Digital World

Operational Excellence in a Digital World

Traditionally in the Service Industry, Operational Excellence (OpEx) focused on the Operations function: Back and Mid Offices fulfilling the client’s request. Main focus was on decreasing handling and throughput time, with techniques like Lean Thinking, Six Sigma and Scientific Management. The goal was mainly to let humans work more efficiently. However, in the last years,…

State of Readiness; Philip Holt, GKN Aerospace

State of Readiness; Philip Holt, GKN Aerospace

We welcome Philip Holt, Vice President of Operational Excellence at GKN Aerospace, for a conversation on State of Readiness.  We start off the program discussing Philip’s two books, “Leading with Lean” and “The Simplicity of Lean”; the latter having won the Bronze Medal in the Axiom Book Awards.  We take a walk in Philip’s shoes…

Lean Busy vs Ignorant Overload Bliss

Lean Busy vs Ignorant Overload Bliss

One of the biggest challenges of a Lean Transformation is to create the ‘Vision of Excellence’; what should we aim to achieve over the coming years, what is possible? This is often problematic because the majority of people in the organisation ‘don’t know what they don’t know’; that is, they haven’t seen what truly Operationally…