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Visual Office

Information is the output of an office. Information can take many forms: email, databases, presentations,decisions. Wastes of Defects, Storage, Motion,

Table top simulation – dock operations

Simulation is the act of imitating or mimicking the behavior of some situation or some process by means of something

Safety Stock to Bridge the Forecast-Accuracy Gap

(From David McPhetrige, founder of TopDown Lean Systems, LLC, providing correct, comprehensive, multi-attribute safety stock analysis, http://topdownleansystems.com.) Surveys indicate that

Total Flow Management

Euclides A. Coimbra and his associates at the Kaizen Institute have created a wonderful and detailed work on the application

Replenishment Strategies

Determining an appropriate production model starts with Demand Profile and Demand Segmentation. High volume low variability items, and low volume

Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream

Hot off the press from the Lean Enterprise Institute … Page 12 & 13 have a brief description

Coefficient of Variation

A measure of the volatility or spread of a time series around the average, for example of customer orders, aka

Demand Profile

Maslow’s hammer, or a golden hammer is an over-reliance on a familiar tool; as Abraham Maslow said in 1969 in

Improve Turnaround, Shutdown, and Outage Duration: After Action Review

The practice of After Action Review, AAR, comes from the military, as in the US Army’s TC25-20 “A Leader’s Guide

Guest Post – Minarai: apprentice, beginner; learn by observing

Guest post by Larry Loucka about minarai: apprentice, learner on Mark Hamel’s blog Gemba Tales: As I ready myself for

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Command Center

“Command Center” brings up images of NASA or maybe a natural disaster response team. For a large planned maintenance turnaround

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Scope Change Management

Uncontrolled scope change is unplanned work and this is a failure of either planning, reliability engineering, or management. Scope Change

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Milestone Reporting

That’s a “GT” on the milestone, as in 10 miles north of Grahamstown South Africa. Milestones were originally stone markers

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Non Stop Critical Path

Maintenance outages, turnarounds, or plant shutdowns are complex, and can involve hundreds or even thousands of temporary workers, and are

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Parallel Planning

Outage readiness is better when all the right people give and receive input at the earliest effective date; bust

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Shutdown & Startup

All too often the battle for managing the duration and cost of a planned plant maintenance shutdown is lost in

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Constraint Busting

Scope and Gantt scrubs, reliability engineering equipment improvement projects, and new technologies are steps we can take to extend the

Improve Turnaround Outage Duration: Externalize

Externalize: when looking at all of the tasks that occur leading up to, during, and after a planned maintenance shutdown

Tips for warehouse sizing

Tips for warehouse sizing: Don’t get fooled by “averages” Consider using statistical tools, such as standard deviation, and P.90 probability

Plant Shutdown Readiness

Shutdown readiness … You’ve heard the sayings “What gets measured gets better” and “Inspect what you expect”, well here’s a

ABC Analysis: how to

ABC Analysis is a common management approach for prioritizing, classifying, or categorizing inventory. Inventory classification is usually based on an

Lean Plant Shutdown Strategies

Whether you call it a plant shutdown, outage, or turnaround getting the right work done, safely, and in the shortest