Standard Work Combination sheet
Standard Work Sheet / Spaghetti Diagram
Work Standard Summary Sheet
Time Observation Form
Decentralized Social Networking
Diaspora is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook.
The project is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000 and within 12 they met their target.
The group received donations in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on November 23, 2010.
Bikenomics
by Elly Blue
9 May 2011 11:09 AM
Economics of bicycling.
as bike commute trips continue to rise nationwide, many employers are catching on to the benefits they can gain by actually encouraging employees to bike to work. Some are even shelling out cold, hard cash in an effort to boost their ranks of bike commuters.
A Dutch study last year found that cycle commuters provide their employers with an economic advantage by requiring fewer sick days each year and enjoying better overall health.
Other research has shown that bike commuters are happier and less stressed than those who drive or take transit. At rush hour, your bicycling employees may get to work faster and with fewer unexpected delays.
Perhaps most quantifiably, bike commuting employees don’t require nearly the same amount of investment in parking—even when employers invest in deluxe, secure bike parking facilities.
OHSU, a teaching hospital in a hilly section of Portland hemmed in by narrow roads and expensive real estate, is acutely attuned to all the benefits of a bicycling workforce. They’ve seen bike trips “skyrocket” since they began handing out a $50 cash incentive for every 30 days of bike commuting an employee logs.
Indoor, secure bike parking with lockers, showers, and changing rooms are the traditional hallmark of a bike-friendly workplace. These amenities can be essential for employees in suburban offices who must look professional after commuting long distances in extreme weather. Several companies go a step further, responding to employee demand by providing dry cleaning pickup and dropoff services so that bicycling employees can skip the once-a-week car commute to restock their supply of fresh suits.
Let’s take another look at Netflix. The company has a much-lauded policy of allowing employees to work whatever hours they like and take as many days off as they need, so long as they continue to excel at their job.
Such policies, and the company cultures they create, can be invaluable to workers who want to skip rush hour, take their bikes on less crowded trains, head off on focus-enhancing lunchtime rides, or simply commute fewer days per week.
We’re fortunate that more and more companies are starting to see past the old prejudices against bicycling and notice the bottom line benefits of encouraging employees—all of them—to ride.
Why we watch high achievers:
We are enthralled by high performing athletes and high achievers not because we find their achievements impressive; it is because we are amazed by what we see we are capable off within them; we watch others discover what we are capable of.
Human Error & Culture
10 min.
When pilots in the cockpit do not communicate openly and honestly and freely; you have problems.
In cultures where it is difficult for a subordinate to speak openly to a superior, you will have more plane crashes.
In hierarchical cultures (countries such as Asian nations, Korea being the example used here) this has been the case and they have had to come to terms with it to change this in the airline industry.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBZcMQILVtc&feature=related
How corporate logos rule your subconscious.
Our world is saturated with commercial images. Each of us is subjected to 3,000 to 10,000 brand exposures every day—not just in television commercials and on freeway billboards but also via the decals on people's T-shirts and the logos on our coworkers' coffee mugs. Psychologists are discovering that exposure to brand images can have a profound effect on everything from honesty to creativity.
To test the effects of brand logo exposure on behavior, researchers set up an experiment in which subjects saw either the Apple logo or the IBM logo subtly displayed. Then they were asked to name as many uses for a brick as they could think of. People who'd seen the Apple logo were more creative—as long as they valued personal creativity to begin with. In another experiment, people were exposed to the logo of either Disney or the E! Entertainment network. Those who saw the Disney logo answered questions more honestly.
"Every brand comes with a set of associations," explains study co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of psychology and marketing at Duke University. "When we're exposed to logos, those associations fire automatically, activating our motivational systems and leading us to behave in ways that are consistent with the brand image"—and our preexisting drives. Over the years, all the Think Different ads we've seen have seared a link in our brains between Apple and creativity. The same goes for Disney and honesty. Unless, of course, you're a disgruntled duck.
Why Canada's housing market is destined to slump
By GEORGE ATHANASSAKOS
The ratio of house prices to income has historically averaged about 3.5 in Canada. It now stands at about 5.5.
In recent years, the gap between house prices and income has been bridged through borrowing. The average Canadian family debt hit $100,000 in 2010. About 17,400 households are behind in their mortgage payments, an increase of nearly 50 per cent since the start of the last recession.
Average house prices have doubled in the last 10 years, while rents have risen by only about 30 per cent. The ratio of house prices to rent is higher in Canada than in any other developed country.
Residential housing investment as a percentage of GDP was 6.48 per cent in 2009, down slightly from 6.76 per cent in 2008, after peaking at 7.13 per cent in 2007. The previous peaks were at 7.26 per cent in 1976 and 7.18 per cent in 1989 - and we know what happened to Canada's housing market in the early 1980s and early 1990s. After residential housing investment as a percentage of GDP peaked in the previous two cycles, the housing market crashed within a few years.
By way of a comparison, this ratio peaked at about 6.1 per cent in the U.S. in the mid-2000s at the height of its housing bubble, and toward the end of the 1980s in Japan, when that country was nearing the end of its own property boom. Both countries experienced sharp declines in housing prices soon afterward. (The ratio stands at 6.0 per cent in China at the end of 2010 - no wonder there is talk of a housing bubble there.)
The ratio of residential investment to GDP has provided a powerful leading indicator of housing corrections around the world and in Canada in the past. would it not work this time around?
Consumers take control of brands on social media with ‘mutant ads’
Sites such as YouTube host videos that often reveal public perception — good or bad
By LAURA KANE
Vancouver Sun May 12, 2011
The commercial is a fake, part of a growing trend of “mutant ads,” or mock ads created by consumers and posted on social media channels, according to a recent Simon Fraser University study.
An international group of researchers, including Leyland Pitt and Michael Parent of SFU’s Beedie School of Business, examined four examples of mutant ads posted on YouTube to determine how consumers are transforming brands — whether companies like it or not.
Consumers+take+control+brands+social+media+with+mutant/4767854/story.html#ixzz1MLdZwFyP
sample videos here also
Unlimited Vacation
This year, for the first time ever, 1 percent of companies report that they offer unlimited paid leave.
Studies have long shown that — believe it or not — such flexibility actually makes workers more productive and engaged.
The movie subscription service Netflix has had unlimited leave for a decade.
... traditional vacation, in fact the whole 9-to-5 workday, is a "relic of the industrial age." Swasey says Netflix values workers who can manage their own time.
Your Brain at Work
Some of the psychology explaining how people work - which also helps business people see the connection between how the mechanics of people matches Lean practices and why it engages employees.
David Rock
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M&w=425&h=349]
another link if that doesn’t work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M
George Koenigsaecker interview & keynote
Interview preceding AME International Lean Conference, Baltimore, 2010
Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
George Koenigsaecker is a principal investor in several Lean enterprises.
George was with the Danaher Corporation, where he was President of the Jacob's Vehicle Equipment Company (whose Lean conversion is featured in the book, Lean Thinking by Jim Womack and Dan Jones) and Group President of the Tool Group, then the largest business unit of Danaher. He also developed and implemented the "Danaher Business System", a comprehensive Lean enterprise model. He has held senior management positions in Finance, Marketing and Operations with Rockwell International and Deere & Company. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School.
Key points:
“I think the encouraging thing is that if you look at public, stock that you could have purchased from 1987 on, when we started the original transformation at Jake Brake, it has been the highest performing public market stock per, articles in the USA Today and so on. So it has been able to take lean lessons and apply them and get financial performance from them. It’s also the expert in the transformation journey. They’ve grown from a few hundred million dollar business to 12-billion dollars and continuing to grow today. And they do it by acquiring companies and transforming them to lean.”
“One is that Danaher and others that have been successful at the lean journey recognize that you have to change senior leadership behaviour. To do that you’ve got to get your CEO and direct reports to think differently about how they do their work. And companies that are very successful at this, pretty much have a required executive immersion program of some sort.”
“If you improve in all the dimensions that you can improve, every line item on your income statement and your balance sheet, everything you can measure financially or operationally will move in a good direction. If you have higher quality, you do it with shorter lead-times, you do it with lower costs, you do it with a more involved workforce. In a sense, you keep that moving, no one will ever be able to capture you. And if you go through an income statement, you’ll have higher revenue because you’ll have higher quality and shorter lead-time and faster product development. You’ll have lower cost at production because of productivity gains. So higher revenue, lower costs works good on an income statement.
You get to the balance sheet and if you’re a manufacturing company, you’ll have lower inventory levels because of flow. You’ll have lower capital equipment because of better utilization through things like TPM and SMIT, and eventually redesigning capital equipment to fit with a lean environment. So on your balance sheet side, you’ll have less of the working capital, you’ll have less of the fixed capital, and often, as you generate more money, you’ll end up with less debt, so you may have less debt on your balance sheet.”
“too often it has been treated like a program and hasn’t led to ultimate success. It is a system that takes a lot of hard work because you have to restudy every process, let’s say five times over a ten-year period as you begin to use that as a way to generate results and build the culture. It’s something that requires senior leaders to have the humility to admit they don’t already know everything about this subject and go back and do some personal learning.
It’s a system that doesn’t allow them to hire someone and delegate it to them because in the end they still won’t know what they’re doing and whether they’re doing the right thing. If you’re going to do something that is fundamentally a significant culture change, that’s going to have to be led by the chief executive officer or it isn’t going to happen. It can’t be led by someone lower level that you delegate it to.”
Perseverance Will Pay Off
Publish date: September 2008
Superfactory
www.superfactory.com
By John M Rubio and
George Koenigsaecker
Long article and highly recommended to read, a few key points:
Manufacturing company leaders cannot wait for the economists to officially declare a recession, as defined by two or more consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.
Now is the time for business managers to assess the direction of their lean efforts and respond to recessionary pressures. If they wait until it is painfully obvious that they have to make changes, company performance will inevitably follow the sales line down and struggle throughout the recession..
Leading Lean Indicators
Toyota’s four “true north” metrics center around
1) human development,
2) quality,
3) lead time and cycle time (delivery), and
4) cost and productivity.
As a word of caution, the key metrics that managers let slide are always the ones that lead to serious problems in a couple of years. The four true north metrics are all related, improving one supports gains in the others.
Following traditional cost-cutting methods, when sales begin to slide most executives will evaluate each line item on the budget and cut those that don’t seem to have an immediate impact on the business. Training programs and continuous improvement efforts are typically the first to go.
It’s not easy for company leaders to see the immediate impact of such cuts on the business.
If they truly regard employees as their most valuable asset, then leaders must invest as much in employee development as they do in any hard assets. Such investments typically deliver a 10:1 return or better, which is far above other investments. This is as true in boom times as it is during a recession.
“Too many company managers embrace popular programs, like Six Sigma, ignoring waste reduction and other variability reduction methods that can also provide huge improvements.
Unfortunately, quality gains can take a long time for customers to notice, and even longer for customers to believe that they will be sustained. In fact, it might take up to three or four years for a company to reap the full market benefit of any quality gains. Even though managers cannot count on such improvements to pull them through a recession they still need to keep grinding them out.
Sustaining Lean
Publisher: Manufacturing Engineering
May 2007 Vol. 138 No. 5
Nothing can replace the direct involvement of leaders
George Koenigsaeker, Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
Many of those on the lean journey often ask the question: "How do we sustain our lean effort? What will it take to truly continue on the path?" While there are probably a number of answers to this question, I would like to suggest a few derived from my own experiences.
excellent article, highly recommended for senior leadership to understand
Strategy Deployment: Linking Lean to Business Strategy
George Koenigsaecker,
Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
Published in Manufacturing Engineering March 2006 Vol. 136 No. 3
The first in a series of six articles on Lean Tools examines the relationship between Strategy Deployment and Lean Manufacturing
George Koenigsaecker
FIND THESE ARTICLES AND READ THEM. THEN REREAD THEM.
Leadership and the Lean Transformation
Published in Manufacturing Engineering
November 2005 Vol. 135 No. 5
It's the most important job facing today's managers
George Koenigsaecker, Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
Key Points:
Very few companies have figured out how to achieve a lean transformation.
One of the common failures of leadership in the lean transformation is a lack of understanding of what's really achievable with lean.
We thought a transformation could generate enterprise productivity gains of, say, 40%. But we found firms that had lower unit volume than ours--in similar products--that were running at 400 - 500% of the output per person at benchmark US operations.
a first step for senior leadership is to participate in a Value Stream Analysis (VSA), an effort that usually requires a multiday commitment. When you build a value stream map and analyze the data, you always find that the time when nothing is happening to the product (or, in the case of administrative processes, to the data) is in the high 90% range. Often the value-adding time is less than 1% of the time the material or data/information spends in your organization.
This is often the first time senior leaders realize how much waste is built into the way work is organized today. In addition to productivity gains, typical gains achieved in the 3% of firms with successful lean transformations noted in the survey above would include:
A reduction in lead times of 95%,
A reduction in accident rates of 95%,
A reduction in customer complaint/reject rates of 95%, and
A reduction in floor space of 80+%.
As a senior leader, you need to get some "learning," or you won't have the minimal knowledge necessary to manage the lean transformation. In addition, something that is transformational by definition involves a lot of change management. You cannot delegate change management to someone who has not been there before, is lower in the hierarchy, and has less of the clout needed to manage the politics of change. Given the magnitude of change, the team wants to know that the leader is also going there.
Finally, you must address resistance. There are always late adopters who will resist anything new. They cannot be left alone. If you leave them alone, they will become a cancer and, like any cancer, they will metastasize throughout the organization unless they are eradicated. Dealing with them can be tough stuff, and if the process of addressing resistance is not understood and led from the top, it won't get done. ..
LONG ARTICLE, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED