From the category archives:

operations

The Source of Dirt

by Pete Abilla May 26, 2009

In Amazon’s 2008 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos shares about a Kaizen event he participated in: At a fulfillment center recently, one of our Kaizen experts asked me, “I’m in favor of a clean fulfillment center, but why are you cleaning? Why don’t you eliminate the source of dirt?” I’ve spoken numerous times about Bezos [...]

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Process Bloat, a Hidden Indigestion (Process Cycle Efficiency)

by Pete Abilla April 21, 2009
This entry is part 21 of 28 in the series Lean and Six Sigma

The Hidden Factory is a term that refers to activities in an operation that were not designed into it, but grew over time as workarounds for the current process.  Most organizations have some form of a Hidden Factory and being able to “see” these hidden factories in an organization requires learning to see what waste [...]

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The Role of The Warehouse in eCommerce and eRetailing: Trade-off and Benefits

by Pete Abilla October 20, 2008

Efficiently optimizing inventory, storage space, labor, costs, and time in eCommerce (e-retailing) is required to attain customer satisfaction and economic profit.  For the Operations Researcher, this is no easy task; for the in-the-dirt manager with competing priorities and pressures from her chain-of-command, it is even a bigger challenge. Most people are familiar with the front-end [...]

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Customer Service Contacts are Symptoms, not Root Causes: How to Apply the 5 Whys

by Pete Abilla October 8, 2008

Most organizations believe that Customer Service contacts are what needs to be fixed or eliminated.  On the surface, that might be true.  But, when approached as a Lean Thinker, Customer Service contacts are truly only symptoms, the root causes of which are not yet fully known.  In what follows, I’ll explain the role of Customer [...]

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Not Accountable, Not Responsible

by Pete Abilla August 9, 2008

Team size can make a big difference in the success of your service or product. What is counterintuitive for most people is that the larger the team size, the lower the likelihood of success for your service or product.  Why? Entropy can set in and large teams are inherently bad vehicles for communication. More insipid, [...]

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Maintain Forward Tension

by Pete Abilla July 20, 2008

One principle in Wing Chun is the maintaining of forward tension.  To explain, I’ll draw the distinction between Tension and Energy and show how this principle in Wing Chun can be applied to Change Management. Tension is a type of Energy A Wing Chun maxim goes as follows: soft and relaxed strength will put your [...]

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Fast Food Congestion

by Pete Abilla July 9, 2008

Every system has constraints — sometimes several — minor bottlenecks and major bottlenecks.  What makes managing constraints even more challenging is that bottlenecks move: up-and-down the process paths. I saw this phenomenon recently during a visit to a fast food restaurant, which I discuss in this post — but, my application of the Theory of [...]

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Do Not Run From Your Customers

by Pete Abilla July 6, 2008

I’ve spoken extensively about the unheralded — but, arguably, the most important — Pillar of The Toyota Production System: Respect for People. Today, I want to highlight an interesting company that appears to have done an amazing job at Participative Management and in eliminating fear and mediocrity in the workplace: Semco Group. I was first [...]

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Necessary but Insufficient

by Pete Abilla June 7, 2008

Motorola (MOT), the inventor of Six Sigma, is in big trouble. Even though it invented Six Sigma, this is a clear example that shows how Lean or Six Sigma are not a cure-all for corporate woes, but that good leadership and a winning strategy are key in a competitive world — Lean or Six Sigma [...]

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