XPS stands for Company-specific Production Systems, and describes corporate-wide improvement programs that aim to improve and maintain a competitive operation system. Usually, XPSs are simply referred to as Lean Production Systems.
“Flying drones in a warehouse? But why?” I was instinctively skeptical when I first heard of drone startup Verity’s idea to fly drones in industrial warehouses. A few years later, more than a hundred Verity drones fly in IKEA’s warehouses worldwide. Here’s the lesson I learned.
Motivated by many media articles warning against JIT as the culprit for supply chain disruptions, the POMS College of Operational Excellence organized the webinar “Just-in-time or Just-in-case” in February 2022. Extending this online debate, five participants co-authored an article intending to provide advice for future research into JIT. After peer-review, the article “Just-in-time for supply chains in turbulent times” is now published open-access in Production and Operations Management.
Continue readingAfter seven years of in-the-making, it’s a thrill to announce the publication of Introduction to Manufacturing: An Industrial Engineering and Management Perspective—an 800-page textbook coauthored with Michel Baudin and published by Routledge.
What is lean? After all these years, there is still confusion. Truth is, opinions on lean differ widely. If you like heated debates, start a discussion thread on the definition of lean on LinkedIn. Many subscribe stubbornly to their own definitions and claim others “don’t get it.” In an attempt to enlighten the debate, the Journal of Operations Management (JOM) has recently published two articles that address the question.
Consider two assembly factories—one assembles a car every minute and the other a bus every hour. Which factory setting is the most favorable for learning lean?
Continue readingDue to the Corona pandemic, critical supply chain shortages have occurred. Many have looked for the problem and pointed at the Just-In-time principle of Lean as one of the evils. This calls for clarification. Lean is not to blame, but part of the solution.
Read moreThis is a republication of my COVID-19 article published in the World Economic Forum Agenda, April 2, 2020.
An epidemic is an emotional issue. With the lives of our friends and loved ones on the line, we tend to respond with the heart first, then the head: Close the borders! Ground the planes!
Factory visits are effective for teaching applied concepts in higher education, but field trips are not easy to plan and organize. What if – rather than the students going to the factories – the factories could come to the students? At ETH Zurich, we integrated virtual reality (VR) technologies into our operations management classes.
Continue readingWhat does lean look like in everyday life? We launched a simple tweet contest in class to make the students reflect on the course material outside the lecture hall. The response and results were terrific.
Continue readingEmerald just published the world’s first peer-reviewed paper taking a management perspective on drones in manufacturing. Written by Omid Maghazei and myself, the paper explores the current state and future opportunities for using drones in factories. The paper published in the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management is open access. Here are the main findings.
It is exciting times for manufacturing. A plethora of recent technological developments creates radically new opportunities for how we develop, manufacture, and deliver products globally. We hear that “the robots are coming” and “jobs will be automated”. Many managers are excited, baffled, or both. Many job takers are worried.
Scientific thinking is a cornerstone of lean thinking, but the lean movement itself has unfortunately become largely unscientific. Here are ten academic lean papers you should know.
How will manufacturing look like in the future? As part of my engagement as Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Production, I featured in a podcast about the future of production. Here is what I had to say about it.
This post about open process innovation first appeared in the World Economic Forum’s Agenda platform on January 11 2018, titled “The future of competitiveness is open“.
The “3 Ms”— muri, mura, muda — is among the most important concepts in lean production. Yet, the Ms are often misjudged.
Terrific news! It is a great honor to receive the prestigious Shingo Research Award for the Routledge Companion to Lean Management, co-edited with Dr. Daryl Powell and published with Routledge earlier this year.
If I should explain my research in two words, I would say “improving productivity”. That was also the title of my inaugural lecture at ETH Zurich today. In the lecture, I presented five rules of productivity improvement, which I summarize in this post. The full inaugural lecture is available here (lecture starts at 7 min 30 sec):
The Routledge Companion to Lean Management has hit the book shelves. Here is a summary of its main conclusions. The key message? Any lean transformation—regardless of the sector and application area—is dependent on the three essential Ls of lean: Leadership for Long-term Learning.
In a series of posts, I will put the spotlight on technologies that eventually will change how we manufacture and deliver products and services. My objective is to demystify the “fourth industrial revolution”— Industry 4.0 — by looking at the specific technologies it concerns. First out is Augmented Reality.
How do firms prioritize and select improvement projects? Unfortunately, the usual method is a combination of guess and chance. Few companies are able to compute the real return on investment from proposed projects, and select the better ones through a rigorous decision process. This is not a trivial problem, but an important one: Many firms spend much money on useless improvements — fixing issues that are non-critical or have low or no effect on factory performance. In these firms, middle managers battle for the attention and investments of senior management by writing up speculative “business cases” for their proposed improvement projects. Few of these firms have heard about Manufacturing Cost Deployment — a structured method for selecting the right improvement project.
Managers encounter a number of tactical questions in their lean journeys that call for decisions and actions. For example, should we have a “lean team”? Should we track lean implementation using bottom-up structures or top-down audit schemes? Should we offer financial and non-financial rewards for lean implementation to employees? These questions were recently answered in the research paper “Implementing corporate lean programs: The effect of management control practices,” by J. Schloetzer, K. Ferdows and myself, published in the Journal of Operations Management. This post* gives a summary.
Two out of three lean programs fail to achieve their initial objectives. My latest research asked 432 practitioners from 83 factories in two multinational corporations what they see as critical factors for succeeding with lean implementation. The research summarized five critical success factors for implementing lean programs that managers must get right. Is your organization on track?
5S. Five short Japanese words, each beginning with an “S”. The majority of employees in the industrial sector, and increasingly in the public sector, have heard about the “5Ss”. The problem? The vast majority of companies trying to “implement” 5S fails, and does so repeatedly. Many mistakes it as a concept for cleaning and tidying up—boring but necessary activities for any professional business. This post* takes a closer look at each of the five S-words, and finds that many of us might have missed the point.
A service you probably consume every single day is broadcasting. Can lean principles help the broadcasting industry produce better value for the audience – and do so more efficiently and more effectively than today? Admittedly, I had never thought about broadcasting as a new application area for lean, but clearly it is coming. This post looks at lean broadcasting, where the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a first mover.
Why do most firms fail in their lean transformations? Because they have not understood the power of lean leadership, says Professor Jeffrey Liker. I spent the last two days together with the Norwegian aluminum producer Hydro ASA, listening to and learning from Liker. Here is a brief reflection on the essentials of lean leadership.
Is your organization struggling to implement lean or any similar process improvement program? This post presents the 10 best Dilbert cartoons on lean management.* Scott Adams’ brilliant and popular cartoons provide a reality check for any change agent involved in process improvement. Next time, ask yourself: What would Dilbert do?
DILBERT © 2006 Scott Adams. Used By permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.
Restarting a new improvement program every quarter or year? The only ones wagging their tails are the consultants. Instead, develop a lasting corporate lean program—and stick with it for a long time.
How can we boost the learning experience when teaching lean production? Admittedly, presentations and monologues from the front of the classroom are rarely something people remember for a long time. Learning can be greatly improved by using games and simulations, which provides the learner first-hand experience in lean and its benefits.
My own Volvo Trucks Lego Lean Game played at a MBA course in Norway
Are certain national cultures better suited to implement lean thinking? In this post, I reflect on the role of national cultures in the roll-out of a corporate lean program.
This post by Professor Kasra Ferdows and myself was featured in Planet Lean (The Lean Global Network Journal) last week. It suggests that organizations that implement lean move through four distinctive stages of lean maturity—each with its own challenges and opportunities.
How do factories respond when the headquarters of a multinational firm rolls out a “new” corporate lean program? In a paper in the International Journal of Operations and Production Management*, Professor Arild Aspelund and I propose that factories can respond in four generic ways; explained by the “4A model”.
