Kaizen: Break to Make Better
To get you started creating a “lean” organization, we’ll focus on “point” kaizen – looking at a single process inside your business and rebuilding it.
Building a Business vs. Building a Car
Employees inside a truly “lean” enterprise don’t consider themselves production workers. They’re problem solvers. The reason they get paid each day isn’t to perform a specific task, but to improve a specific process. Every small business owner or top-level manager out there shows up to work every day focused on getting the job done. You’d
What’s the Goal of any Business? To Make Money
I’ll add a couple of caveats to that.
Waste Not, Want Not: Eliminate “Waste” in the Business
The overall objective of a process-centered enterprise is to eliminate “waste” in the business. In doing so, you can more effectively deliver what customers want — and reduce your costs.
The Efficiency Myth
Everything you’ve ever learned about efficiency is wrong. Individual efficiencies don’t
matter one bit. It’s the overall process — the process efficiency — that we need to
focus on.
Facing Your Fears
If you’re making decisions out of fear, you’re making bad decisions. Although this shop owner was referring to how repairers are agreeing to just about anything because they’re afraid — afraid of angering an insurer, afraid of losing work, afraid of going out of business — his comment, taken in the larger context, epitomizes a
The Heat Is on: Buying My Heat Inductor
I’ve made a lot of misguided tool purlchases through the years, but buying my heat inductor wasn’t one of them.
Strategies to Stretch Profit Margins
Your options for increasing profit margins are limited when a vendor supplies you with the part, material or service. Instead, focus on improving the one profit margin you do have direct control over: labor.
Build a Better Mousetrap, and the World Will Beat a Path to Your Door
7 strategies for quality-driven shops to maintain profitability in a marketplace fixated on “fast” and “cheap.”
Inside an Old-Timer’s Toolbox
In the early days when a bodyman faced a repair problem, he couldn’t just buy what he needed. He had to conceive a tool that would repair the problem- and then forge it himself.