eta consulting has collaborated with Extended Studies, University of Nevada, Reno to deliver a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification class since 2016. Earlier this month, eta took fourteen Green…
adminAugust 16, 2024
“Ideally, I would like runners to be up to 15 to 25 weekly miles before starting to train for a marathon. Not every new marathoner possesses this much base, but…
Neil DeshpandeMay 26, 2024
Kaizens are five-day high-energy, high-impact events where 6-10 people examine a process, redesign it to reduce Lean waste, test it, and deploy it for use the following week. Kaizens emphasize…
adminMay 9, 2024
eta consulting’s Nicole Harvey and Rishi Malhotra visited a small clothing manufacturer with annual sales of $1.5M to learn the client’s situation and discuss how Lean can be used to…
Nicole HarveyMay 2, 2024
Hiroyuki Hirano lays out the approach to 5S in great detail and with great clarity. The book is filled with beautiful explanations like this diagram that bring scalable logic to…
adminFebruary 14, 2019
Daniel J. Levitin explains organization via cognitive neuroscience principles, adding data and detail to many lean concepts along the way. Worker autonomy is called out as key to creativity. 'The…
adminFebruary 13, 2019
“Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. . . They are the questions with no answers . . . it is questions with…
adminApril 25, 2018
Much of lean practice centers around the elimination of waste. What precedes that is some training in the detection of waste, usually categorized under the eight lean wastes, viz., Defects, Overproduction,…
adminApril 24, 2018
Sir Ken Robinson considers what a revolution in education might look like. His declared goal is to eliminate drop-out in schools, but the ideas may be universally applicable to all…
adminFebruary 25, 2018
Ray Dalio talks about his life and the building of Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund (by assets) at $100+ billion. Many of his ideas mirror lean concepts. Here he talks…
adminFebruary 19, 2018
In "Hit Refresh" Microsoft's third CEO, Indian-American Satya Nadella grapples with the notion of automation-related increases in productivity eliminating jobs. He is optimistic about the future of human work. "Finally,…
adminFebruary 9, 2018
"The problem of recognition of production has seldom been approached properly . . . One error has been the orientation of indications of recognition towards results rather than towards processes…
adminDecember 14, 2017
From NASA in 1949 to offshore petroleum exploration, to civil aviation, food, to manufacturing in 1970, the FMEA has served to reduce waste in the form of defects, lost time,…
adminDecember 11, 2017
The CEO of Pal's Sudden Service, a privately-owned quick-service restaurant chain that won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2001, explains supplier development. 'They said a lot of the…
adminDecember 11, 2017
Lean in restaurants, from supply chain to construction to menus. "Well, it was very, very efficient. First of all, the investment cost was very low. And, you know, typical fast…
adminDecember 11, 2017
Should those continuous improvement suggestions that are not readily amenable to a business case be implemented? Will implementing them result in losses, or foster a culture that leads to profits?…
adminDecember 11, 2017
The beginning of lean for GM happened at the current Tesla plant in Fremont, CA. "The key to the Toyota production system was a principle so basic it sounds like…
adminDecember 11, 2017
The beginnings of lean, written about in 1926. "Take a vein in a coal mine. As long as it remains in the mine, it is of no importance, but when…
adminDecember 11, 2017
This is a quick read on a system-level approach to reducing the number of errors and dealing with those that remain. ". . . if you're confronted with simple and…
adminSeptember 1, 2017