Each month new articles, book reviews, and other content are added to the Superfactory website. The new content is featured in the free monthly e-newsletter which goes out to 50,000 subscribers worldwide, and we will also post a monthly heads-up on this blog.
New content in February includes:
The featured article is from one of the founders of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, Robert "Doc" Hall, and is titled The Culture Thing. The following is a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire article here.
In a recent survey, AME members said that their hottest topic is working culture. Art, music, and tribal anthropology may characterize ethnic culture, but what about working culture? Anthropologists agree that, like jazz, words inadequately describe any culture to someone not directly experiencing it. We "dig it," or we don’t. Much about culture is implicit — sensed — not explicitly discussed. And the culture hardest for us to see and describe is our own, like that old conundrum: Does a fish see the water it swims in?
The Other Perspectives section has an article by Robert Hawkey of Lean Horizons titled Discovering the Lean Supply Chain – Transforming Suppliers into Powerful Lean Differentiators. The following is a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire article here.
Mention the phrase “strategic sourcing” and a number of thoughts, concepts and disciplines come to mind including supplier selection strategies, supplier performance improvement, purchased price reductions and streamlined buyer-supplier transactions management. While each of the preceding tactics can play an important role in supply chain optimization, they all fail to capture one of the single biggest advantages supply chain operations confer on any manufacturer by providing a tailor-made vehicle for driving Lean outside of the organization’s four walls and upstream into the supplier community.
The featured book for this month is, go figure, Evolving Excellence: Thoughts on Lean Enterprise Leadership by yours truly Kevin Meyer and co-blogger Bill Waddell. A short synopsis is below, and you can learn more about the book or order it here.
A 450-page categorized compilation of favorite posts from the Evolving Excellence blog, this book offers different – even outright contradictory – viewpoints that explore various aspects of lean enterprise excellence. In the shared desire to see American manufacturing thrive, authors Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell have poured their knowledge, opinions, and ideas into their blog for the past two years. Sometimes tongue in cheek, usually provocative, occasionally humorous, but always passionate, they point out the failures of companies, organizations, and individuals in the manufacturing industry while also lauding those that understand true excellence.
We continually update the other major sections of the website, including:
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Events Calendar: a listing of lean excellence seminars, workshops, training, and conferences worldwide
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Topic Information: Summaries and resources on over 40 enterprise excellence topics.
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History of Excellence: A growing timeline of notable events that helped shape current-day enterprise excellence
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PowerPoint Presentations: Over 50 downloadable PowerPoint presentations on lean manufacturing, quality, enterprise, and safety concepts.
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Factory Toolbox: Almost 300 downloadable forms, procedure templates, assessments, and tools to help you not reinvent the wheel.
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Tools and Assessments: Downloadable assessment tools.
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Virtual Factory Tours: Web and streaming video tours of over 100 factories.
We are always looking for new articles and other content. Contact us via the Superfactory website if you would like to contribute to our knowledge base.