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 January includes:
The Superfactory 20 list of companies with strong lean manufacturing programs was released, and the 
stock performance of each of those companies is being tracked individually and as a group versus the S&P500. Last year these companies outperformed the S&P500 by 20%… this year it isn’t quite as hot. Yet. Check out the list and performance, updated hourly.
For all you LinkedIn junkies, we have created a LinkedIn group for Superfactory. Join the group to
network with other Superfactory enthusiasts and to show our logo on your profile. If you haven’t explored LinkedIn, check it out to see why over 17 million professionals use it for networking.
The featured article is from our fellow lean blogger Mark Graban of the Lean Blog and is titled Lean Healthcare. The following is a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire article here.
Hospitals around the world are successfully implementing Lean methods for the benefit of patients, employees, physicians, and the hospital organizations. It is possible, through Lean and the Toyota Production System, to simultaneously provide better care, better quality, and lower costs.
Hospitals worldwide face a wide range of problems and pressures that have inspired them to look outside of healthcare for inspiration. Payers, ranging from government agencies to private insurers, are forcing price reductions on hospitals, which requires hospitals to reduce costs in order to maintain their margins. Even not-for-profit hospitals need to have a surplus to remain financially viable and to drive future growth. Hospitals are becoming less able to demand “cost plus” pricing that pays them for their efforts as opposed to being paid flat rates based on patient diagnoses. Compounding the pricing pressures, the U.S. government, through Medicare and Medicaid, has proposed new rules under which hospitals would no longer be paid for care required to treat a range of preventable errors, including some hospital acquired infections and items left inside patients after surgery. Hospitals would be left to absorb the cost of poor quality themselves, which should provide incentives for improvement.
The Featured Blog Post is Dan Markovitz’s recent piece titled Why a To-Do List Just Doesn’t Work. The following is a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire post here.
Jim Womack, founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute and the man responsible for putting Lean on the map (at least in this country), recently wrote an article about what he calls “cadence.” This concept ties in nicely to what I preach about how to “live in your calendar” rather than your inbox, and why a to-do list just isn’t a powerful enough tool to enable you to manage your work.
The featured book this month is Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement by Richard 
Schonberger. The following is a brief summary, click here for more information.
Why are some companies highly successful with their lean Six Sigma performance management initiatives, while most are not? Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement shows readers how to get process improvement going, and keep it going for many years. The key is an expended concentration on what are most important to customers, namely quality, response time, flexibility, and value. The author provides readers with valuable benchmarks and best-practice models based on results from his own extensive, long-ranging research, including hard data from 1,200 companies throughout the world.
We continually update the other major sections of the website, including:
- Events Calendar: a listing of lean excellence seminars, workshops, training, and conferences worldwide
- Topic Information: Summaries and resources on over 40 enterprise excellence topics.
- History of Excellence: A growing timeline of notable events that helped shape current-day enterprise excellence
- Online E-Learning Center: Fourteen interactive online presentations on the core concepts of lean manufacturing.
- PowerPoint Presentations: Over 50 downloadable PowerPoint presentations on lean manufacturing, quality, enterprise, and safety concepts.
- Factory Toolbox: Almost 300 downloadable forms, procedure templates, assessments, and tools to help you not reinvent the wheel.
- Tools and Assessments: Downloadable assessment tools.
- 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.