Realizing Lean Entrepreneurship

What we are all striving for: Create a culture of continuous improvement built on a foundation of lean and integrate it with a workforce that thinks like an owner. SRCHoldings spreads their model for workforce entrepreneurs. ...

... "He had the factory humming on the track of continuous improvement and lean manufacturing. Now, we needed to take them into entrepreneurial mode. " ...

Via New York Times: Starting Over in Lexington

Lean Culture Shift

Local manufacturers benefit from the lean implementation and training assistance at Polk State College in Florida. ...

... "The intent of the grant is seed money to start a cultural shift to a LEAN manufacturing culture, said Steve Kullberg, director of operations at Florida's Natural. " ...

Via The Ledger: LEAN Program

Lean Evangelist

John Grabner and Cardinal Fastener embrace lean manufacturing to achieve market success in producing hot forged bolts. ...

... "Grabner, who hosted President-elect Obama last February, is also an evangelist for lean thinking, a manufacturing philosophy initially associated with Toyota Corp.'s lean manufacturing but today a way of thinking that can transform a company's culture from the shop floor to the front office. " ...

Via cleveland.com: John Grabner of Cardinal Fastener

Dominion Six Sigma Workforce Adoption

Dominion Six Sigma journey has spanned almost a decade and trained over one third of the workforce on the path to excellence. ...



Dominion has integrated Six Sigma into all facts of improvement in the company. For example, safety performance is approaching the best practice in the utility industry. ...

Dominion Dimensions (PDF): "The company’s award-winning Six Sigma process improvement program has contributed to this success. It has helped reduce accidents and injuries at our Dominion Virginia Power unit, cut gas losses at Dominion Energy, slashed water usage at our fossil power stations, and boosted productivity at our nuclear stations. "

Six Sigma Quality for Scale

Six Sigma process is needed to scale products and processes globally while sustaining quality. Design thinking allows a company to adapt and shift its growth strategies. Both methods need to coexist for large enterprises to evolve successfully. ...

... "On a much larger scale, it is unimaginable that Intel could produce a single one of its highly complex semiconductor chips or that Procter & Gamble could deliver laundry detergent of consistent quality globally without these types of analytical techniques. " ...

Via New York Times: Six Sigma and Design Mix

GM Kaizen

GM's Tom Stephens brings his personal kaizen to the product development job. ...

... "I'm here to defend Tom, for one simple character trait: He's a tinkerer. He has devoted his entire life to making things a little bit faster, a little bit more durable, a little bit more reliable. " ...

Via Automotive News: Tinkering GM

Six Sigma Integrates the Value Chain

Six Sigma is key ingredient to positioning Ring Power as an integrated, efficient value chain participant. ...

... "Since mid-2007, though, Ring Power has been able to apply the process to its own operations and organization, creating a continuous improvement culture of its own that meshes with but does not exactly reflect Caterpillar's. " ...

Via Purchasing: Six Sigma

Lean Culture Leads to Recognition of Excellence

Carestream Health's Rochester manufacturing facility is recognized with a Shingo Silver Medallion for its excellence in lean manufacturing. ...

... "The Rochester facility, which makes approximately 70 percent of all dental X-ray film sold worldwide, uses lean manufacturing practices to optimize the quality and consistency of the product it delivers to customers while also enabling financial savings for the company. By committing to a lean culture, the facility is able to deliver goods and services with higher quality, fewer defects, and within shorter timelines than traditional production methods. " ...

Via Carestream Healthcare: Shingo Prize Award

AGY Lean Manufacturing Culture

AGY sees strong results in revenue, earnings, and EBITDA. The company is seeing results from its lean continuous improvement program. ...

... "2008 was a transitional year for AGY, as we successfully expanded capacity to meet defense demand requirements, implemented a lean manufacturing culture focused on continuous improvement initiatives and efficiency gains, introduced a suite of next-generation products that will facilitate long-term growth, and have signed a definitive agreement to acquire a controlling interest in Shanghai Grace Technology Company Limited." ...

Via AGY: 2008 Fourth Quarter and Year-End Results

Six Sigma Pros Are Satisfied at Vought

Vought Aircraft's experience with lean strategies and Six Sigma, through its Vought Operating System, creates an environment that satisfies the career needs of Six Sigma professionals. The company is recognized as ranking No. 2 on the Top 10 list of Best Places to Work for Six Sigma pros. ...

... "Companies were ranked by totaling the scores from the two surveys. The greatest weight was given to the employee portion, which asked questions in five main categories: job satisfaction, culture, compensation/rewards and recognition, training and career development, and net promoter score (NPS). Of these categories, job satisfaction was weighted as being the most important. In just two years, 209 Vought employees have completed the Six Sigma green belt training, with 77 receiving certification. Twenty-three employees went on to become black belts. Projected savings of all black and green belt projects combined exceeds $25 million. " ...

Via Vought Aircraft: Second in Nation for Six Sigma Professionals


Vought Corsair ...

Vectron Six Sigma Manufacturing

Vectron practices lean and Six Sigma to improve its manufacturing process and product quality. In doing so, it embraces the methodology and creates a enterprise variant that works in its culture. ...

... "The facility has adopted lean manufacturing practices such as Kaizen and Six Sigma methods, all with an eye toward continuous facility and product improvement. The company follows a 16-point plan that has cut manufacturing cycle times in half compared to earlier attempts to reduce overall production times. " ...

Via Vectron: Frequency Control

Kaizen Culture

Experts from PPG Automotive Refinishing division will discuss kaizen and workforce culture at NACE session. ...

... "Kaizen Management: Building a Continuous Improvement Culture ... " ...

Via NACE 2008: Kaizen Session

Continuous Improvement Culture

76th Aircraft Maintenance Group embraces Six Sigma and lean as it trains its workforce, energizes the staff, and focuses on the identification of improvement opportunities. ...

... "Identifying key administrative wastes and the constraints limiting an organization’s performance, analyzing potential root-causes and applying the proper continuous-improvement countermeasures are critical, Mr. Williams explained. " ...

Via Tinker TakeOff: Transformation

Six Sigma Culture

Companies see tangible financial benefits accrue through adoption of Six Sigma methods and integrating continuous improvement techniques into the workforce culture. ...

... "The company has the potential to save $370,000 on two projects it has done so far, and plans to make Six Sigma part of the Geddes steel maker's culture, he said. " ...

Via Syracuse dot com: Six Sigma savings

Understand Your Style to Practice Better Six Sigma

Kaizen Culture Compatible With Pace of Business Change

Does the kaizen culture position an enterprise to deal with the high-pace of business change? Leadership coach discusses managing meaningful change in an organization and the commitment necessary to endure successive waves of change.

... "What is so striking in today's workplaces is the sheer volume of those continuous improvement changes and the rate of change to the changes. " ...

Via Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Leading change

Executive Sponsorship of Six Sigma Education

Company CEO publicly recognizes his employees on their achievements in Six Sigma. ...

... "Batelco Chief Executive Peter Kaliaropoulos congratulated and rewarded 10 employees who have been certified as Six Sigma Black Belts, following their successful completion of the required professional training, through Juran Institute, USA. " ...

Via Batelco: Employee Recognition

Wausau Paper Lean Six Sigma Cultural Approach

Wausau Paper discusses its lean and Six Sigma approach in the enterprise during its earnings call with analysts. Its Lean Six Sigma implementation varies across the lines of business. ...

... "Where we have technical problem solving issues as it relates to high performance grades and specialty, you might see a Six Sigma approach with respect to broader cost reduction opportunity, you might see a lean approach being used and sorry to tell you it somewhat differs necessarily from one business to the other but it tends to be a continuous and intense cultural approach within the corporation. " ...

Via Seeking Alpha: Wausau Paper Corp. Q4 2007 Earnings Call Transcript

Kaizen Small Improvements Accumulate

Philosophy of workforce harmony is supported with a foundation of kaizen improvement to enable success of the enterprise. ...

... "They call it kaizen, or continuous improvement. ... Every employee of a company is focused on making many small improvements wherever they may be. It could be as simple as always maintaining a clean workplace, which reduces confusion and allows workers to remain focused. " ...

Via Grand Forks Herald: Wind turbine blade manufacturer

Toyota Production System Highlights

TPS reviewed in this vid. ...

Innovative Thinking Integrated With Culture

Innovation is needed to differentiate corporate and product performance in the global economy. Lean principles can be extended to the growth agenda to support building an innovative culture and workforce. ...

... "What is really needed today is what I call systematic and lean innovation. That is, you have to make innovative thinking part of the entire corporate culture. " ...

Via Oakland Business Review on MLive: Lean Innovation Summit

TQM Total Quality Across the Organization

Total quality management requires a rethinking of the organization. The workforce should be enabled through training and mentoring. Roles should be defined to monitor quality in the process. And, the organization should understand how the customer values quality. ...

... "Put simply, Total Quality Management (TQM) is the process of instilling quality throughout an organisation and its business processes. " ...

Via Economic Times: Quality management

Six Sigma Reward System Scales With Benefits

Fort Leavenworth responds to Six Sigma adoption barriers with a scalable reward system. ...

... "So, the Garrison's Lean Six Sigma Tiger Team formulated a reward system for civilian, military and contract employees. The reward corresponds with the success of the idea. " ...

Via Leavenworth Lamp: Incentives

Lean Principles Leadership Culture Empowers Employees

Wisconsin manufacturing company sees success from lean principles. The company's leadership committment creates an empowered culture of continuous improvement. The company will be recognized with a manufacturing award this week. ...

... "Lean manufacturing principles, in combination with our strong leadership culture, have allowed PCMC to flourish. We have created a unique environment based on continuous improvement and employee empowerment ... " ...

Via Green Bay Press-Gazette: Wisconsin Manufacturing Success

Six Sigma Internship Provides Insights at Grainger

Intern at Grainger shares experiences from Grainger which included survey on the company's Six Sigma performance management system. ...

Jack Welch on Six Sigma Customer-focused Company

Jack Welch offers his perspective on how Six Sigma will make the enterprise more customer focused. ...

Six Sigma Data Quality Requires an Architecture

Better and more insightful decision making can offer a competitive advantage to a company, provided the underlying foundation is built on data quality. Improved data quality requires an architecture, a culture, and a process. ...

... "Using this architecture, it is even possible to progress systematically toward a Six Sigma level of quality management. This design is in response to the current lack of a published, coherent architecture for addressing data quality issues. " ...

Via DMReview: Data Quality

Six Sigma Culture Incompatible at GE Division

Even in the bastion of Six Sigma, GE, there exists barriers to cultural adoption. ...

... "frequently called for the sale of NBC Universal because of its declining revenue and GE's Six Sigma discipline not being compatible with Hollywood sensibilities. " ...

Via BloggingStocks: GE Volatility

Process Depends on Culture

3M challenged by balancing disciplined process execution with flexibility needed to sustain creativity and innovation. It is difficult for an enterprise to sustain cultures necessary to be successful at both initiatives. ...

... "Buckley, a PhD chemical engineer by training, seems to recognize the cultural ramifications of a process-focused program on an organization whose fate and history is so bound up in inventing new stuff. " ...

Via Business Week: 3M Six Sigma

Quality Role in Six Sigma Organization

Quality needs to be repositioned in a Six Sigma culture and organization model. Quality leader(s) can create a strategic view of quality in the business. The quality team has a role in operations to ensure focus on those variables that are critical to quality from a customer perspective. Don't ignore the opportunity to rethink the quality organization as Six Sigma is implemented. ...

... "Strategic quality work begins with an understanding of where the company and its products fit in the marketplace. The vice president of quality or the quality manager must join top management in setting the strategic direction of the company. " ...

Via Qualilty Mag: Quality Evolution

Kaizen Learning, A Way of Life

Want a better life? ... learn (or kaizen) ...

... "In the Japanese culture, continuous learning (they call it kaizen) is a key part of their lives. It's a belief that life is a journey and that knowledge can and should increase with every step taken. " ...

Via Community Press: Lifetime Learning

Award Recognizes Leader of Lean Organization

Company president recognized for lean manufacturing achievements. ...

... "I attribute this recognition to the many Ariens employees who have embraced lean manufacturing in creating a culture of continuous improvement, says Ariens. In the process they have driven the company's annual productivity gains. " ...

Via Lawn & Landscape: Manufacturing Award

Six Sigma Thought Process Pervades Employee Culture

Small companies can have success with Six Sigma through using its DMAIC process to guide employee behaviors and thought process. ...

... "Your company may be math-challenged and the thought of doing anything with statistics may put you to sleep, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Through the Six Sigma DMAIC thought process, you can involve employees in reaching company goals. " ...

Via Inc: Six Sigma

3M Six Sigma Culture: Risk Averse ?

3M adds manufacturing capacity to drive growth. Six Sigma focus may have clouded its judgement with regards to investing for growth. ...

... "In the past, a 3M culture that viewed new investment with circumspection and an over-reliance on the Six Sigma management technique made it shy of building some needed capacity, Buckley said. " ....

Via MarketWatch: 3M