Tag Archives: Manufacturing Engineering

Change Agent Must Be a Warrior – Sun Tzu The Art of War

I recently described the manufacturing environment as controlled chaos to a candidate for an open position.  Then I just read an excerpt from The Art of War as follows: Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder is simply a question … Continue reading

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Letter to New Industrial Engineers

This is my letter to the interns who I worked with in the summer of 2011 and anyone else who is going into the field.   I have worked in the industrial/manufaturing engineering field for over 30 years.  The reason I … Continue reading

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Memories from Lean Manufacturing Engineering

For some reason I’m going through memories form the past 30 years working in manufacturing and there are some themes that keep re-ocurring.  The funny thing is that I thought that things would progress.  One of the fallacies of our … Continue reading

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5S Power Struggles – Part One

Since we’re having to go back to basics, the first thing that Operations management has decided to go forward with is 5S.  It is the first thing that can be done easily and without some kind of visual factory, it’s … Continue reading

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Story of 3 College Summer Interns – Dedication to Manufacturing

In the corporate world there is a thing called summer interns.  My exposure started at Medtronic with an intern from the home state of Minnesota. It turned out that he came at the perfect time to help with a machining … Continue reading

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How to Deal With Difficult People Management Experiment

Manufacturing Engineering can be many things in many industries and there are difficult  people are in all industries and all departments. I’ve been tracking different methods of working with difficult people through this blog in a series called Using Teaching … Continue reading

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Lean and Improvement Kata – Side by Side

I am recording the emergence of lean and the improvement kata in a company with very little maturity in either area.  This can’t be a unique situation and is worthy of recording.   It is a two fold approach.  One side is … Continue reading

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Corridor of Improvement

I want to use the concept of corridor of improvement for rating the new converts (or at least my attempt to make them converts). What is the corridor of improvement?  According to Toyota Kata workbook it is the area where … Continue reading

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What are the 3 Typical Things that Manufacturing Engineering Has to Finish in Design Transfer?

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Lean Benchmarking – Visit to Quality Systems

This is the 3rd visit we’ve made to local companies who are on their lean journey.  Following are the responses from the attendees: We had a first-hand opportunity to observe in action on-line travelers and on-line work instructions. For me … Continue reading

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