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The Sixth Sigma: Achieve Breakthrough Performance Using Six Sigma

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Will Six Sigma Impact Innovation

Six Sigma and innovation are often seen at odds with one another. However, the improvement mindset can be tuned to identify and exploit breakthrough innovations. ...

... "Basically, to be an innovative company, one needs to encourage incremental improvement and always strive for the breakthrough. If there is a secret it is to foster the attitude of let's find the change that will improve our performance. " ...


Via Caller-Times: J.P. Ellenberger

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Monday, May 12, 2008

Lean Specialist Sees Process Constraints

Lean is a mindset and lean practitioners can spot constraints quickly. ...

... "They will have an obvious bottleneck in the milk frothing process and yet when the guy has finished heating the milk he will start pouring it into the cups, thereby starving the constraint. " ...


Via Ferret: Volgren's Peter Campbell focuses on Lean

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Thursday, November 29, 2007

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

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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Hospital Lean Thinking Enabled By RFID Technology

Hospital will digitize lean thinking through the use of RFID technology in healthcare processes. ...

... "HealthIT Cluster chief executive Andrea Pettet says the trial aims to use RFID tagging to ease overcrowding in emergency departments, using the principles of lean thinking. " ...


Via Stuff.co.nz: Hospital Patient Tracking

Hospital Operational Efficiency

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Thursday, October 25, 2007

The Next Generation Factory Uses Lean Techniques to Shift Thinking

AMD's Dr. Douglas Grose sees lean techniques as a strategic imperative to streamline the Next Generation Factory (NGF). ...

AMD see lean techniques as critical for the success of next generation manufacturing

... "Building on its pioneering efforts in the adoption of Lean techniques and Automated Precision Manufacturing in semiconductor factories, AMD is joining with industry partners, including ISMI, to develop new tools and processes for further streamlining both front-end and back-end production. For example, current practice across the industry is to move wafers through the process steps in 25 wafer batches, but most of the tools can only process a few or even one wafer at a time, greatly increasing the amount of time it takes to process an entire 25 wafers, slowing the delivery to the customer and extending time-to-revenue for the manufacturer. Small Lot Manufacturing (SLM) and Single Wafer Tools (SWT) are proposed changes that would greatly improve manufacturing efficiency, but requires an industry-wide shift in thinking. Collaborating on addressing this issue and others magnifies the impact by distributing investments of time, talent and money across all the parties that ultimately benefit. " ...


Via AMD: Customer at Center of Chip Manufacturing


Related:

Rapid Prototyping, Tooling and Manufacturing: "A major break-through has been achieved in rapid manufacturing by moving from SLS to SLM. "

Rapid Manufacturing

NGMTI: "The purpose of the Next Generation Manufacturing Technology Initiative (NGMTI) is to accelerate the development and implementation of breakthrough manufacturing technologies ... "

Manufacturing - Next Generation Manufacturing: "This will require factories that can be quickly reconfigured to adapt to changing production and that can be operated by highly-motivated and skilled knowledge workers. "

Customer Centric Enterprise: "Solving the trade-off between customer centric manufacturing on the one hand (meaning high variety and fast responsiveness) and low costs, stable capacity utilization and high quality on the other necessitates incorporating systematic methodologies for manufacturing planning, process design and quality assurance in an integrated manner. "

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Florida Lean Manufacturing Imperative

Manufacturing training offers opportunity for workers to challenge themselves. Workers that can think and embrace a quality mindset are positioned for success. ...

Lumedyne sees benefits of lean

... "When Lumedyne implemented the Lean Manufacturing process, its production increased from five units per week to 15 units in three days, Rhoden said. " ...


Via St Petersburg Times: Manufacturing Training

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