You’ve seen the comments about supply chain visibility, and maybe you’ve encountered some technology providers who want you to know all about how their solution is the best for it. But first, you’ll need to know what it is and whether it’s useful for your business.

Value stream mapping seems like a cryptic artificial constraint to the outsider, but it can actually be a powerful tool for your business. If you get past seeing this as a documentation exercise and explore the possibilities it exposes for operational improvements, you’ll see how a value stream map is worth your time.

The future of manufacturing is localized, agile, asset-light, and focused on customization to meet each customer’s preference.

Many people know about the two pillars of the Toyota Production System (TPS): just-in-time and jidoka, and they probably know the two principles of TPS – continuous improvement and respect for people.

Kaizen is a term you’ll hear thrown out casually in conversation with many manufacturing leaders. If you’ve been using context clues to get by this far, you’ve likely figured out that it has something to do with always improving. So what exactly is kaizen, and why are people talking about it?

You’ve probably encountered a scenario in which you needed to stop production to solve an issue causing defects. And you probably lost more productivity than you would have liked, especially if you didn't find out about it until a few hours later when someone casually mentioned the problem at the water cooler like it was common knowledge.

From metaverse to augmented reality, these terms are spinning a bunch of buzz around them, but what do they really mean? There continues to be a lot of discussion around augmented reality in manufacturing. However, we have not seen a breakthrough use case to date that has uncovered a trove of value creation.

There are likely many times you’ve encountered problems that arose from something being unclear. Communication is key, as the saying goes. That’s where visual management comes in.

One of the first steps toward adopting the Lean methodology is implementing the five S’s. You might have heard of these before, but we’re going to make it clear what these terms are, what they mean, and how you can use the 5S methodology to set a strong foundation for future operational improvements.

Delivering on time and including everything the customer ordered are key to succeeding in the supply chain. So how should you measure your performance in this area?

Have you ever gone through the steps of a process and thought, “Wow, that was easy”? If you have, there’s a chance that poka-yoke was involved. There’s a common refrain that good design goes unnoticed. Maybe that’s why you haven’t heard of poka-yoke until just now.

Perhaps you’ve heard of process lead time, a common metric in manufacturing that gives you an idea of how long you’ll have to wait on a widget if you start working on it right now. But you might not know that it’s closely related to a queue theory concept called Little’s Law.

When you need to know what to produce, how much of it to produce, and what order to produce it in, you have a couple ways to approach the problem. You can push through orders and create piles of inventory, or you can pull orders continuously to keep your production flowing smoothly.

There’s a good reason you hear about Lean, Six Sigma, and probably Lean Six Sigma all the time as a manufacturing leader. It’s a powerful way to manage your production, and so contagious that proud practitioners of this method often include their certification next to their names like doctors or lawyers.

Maybe you’ve heard of critical path project management, but what about critical chain project management? You might be wondering what the advantages could be of this project management approach.

Maybe you’re familiar with just-in-time as a concept, but what’s this about a just-in-time workforce?

You’ve likely been here before: you get an order that’s unusually large from your customer. And then another customer, and another customer. So you take that as a sign that demand has increased for your product, and you order enough supplies to sustain this level of demand based on your forecasts. Then a couple weeks later, your demand has settled back to its average level. What happened?

If you’ve shopped online lately and ordered from a major retail store, you’ve probably received an order that was shipped from the store.

You’ve found that some parts of your operation move more slowly than others. And you’ve done what you can to work around it. It might seem like common sense adjustments to you, but the topic goes deeper than it seems on the surface.

Micro-fulfillment is gaining traction in the supply chain as a viable strategy. You’ve probably seen it in headlines, and whether you know it or not, you’ve almost certainly shopped somewhere that’s operating a micro-fulfillment center. So what’s this all about?

You’d like to add capacity and capabilities to your organization, but it’s not clear the best way to do this. Staff augmentation sounds like it might be a solution, but the term doesn’t make it immediately clear what this is or how it works.

You’ve seen the words “pick and pack” floating around on job boards or in work descriptions, but what exactly does that mean?

Your organization likely shares a common thread with most others – the goal of making a profit. This may be your goal for its own sake, or your organization may need to generate profits to enable its pursuit of other goals. You’ve probably got things that are holding you back from this, but sometimes it’s hard to know what these constraints are and how to eliminate them.

In today’s world, Lean is being challenged as never before due to higher customer requirements and the digital revolution of Industry 4.0. The challenge to keep up in the landscape leads to the questions: Are Lean principles in conflict with the digitization that is Industry 4.0? Are Lean principles in conflict with serving your customer in the manner in which they have requested? The short answer is mostly no, and we’ll dig into the alignments and variances below. But, in order to keep up in today’s world, Lean does need to evolve to match today’s quick response, digital environment.

When you need more workers to get the job done, but you know you won’t need their help in a few months or even weeks, that’s a tough spot to be in from a hiring perspective. Thus the temp agency was born. But what exactly does a temp agency do, and how can it help your business?

You’ve probably heard of Lean before. It’s the thing everyone is talking about, but nobody seems to be able to explain when you ask them about it. Is it a book? Can you do it without a teacher? Do you have to join a club to learn its secrets?

Operations managers are facing labor issues daily related to recruiting, retention, utilization, and performance. Maybe you are facing these challenges and making trade-offs so you have the right amount of labor to meet your production schedule. Doing so is a balancing act that requires some out-of-the-box thinking.

On-Demand labor has emerged as a new labor model for manufacturing, logistics, and other supply chain operations. Many businesses are adopting this new way to adjust capacity in response to demand, but you might still be asking, what is on-demand labor, and what problem does it solve?

The last few years may have introduced more new capabilities into the manufacturing sector than most manufacturing practitioners will see in a lifetime.  Many industry experts expect, as a result, that manufacturing will change more in the next five years than it has over the last 20 years.  The change is being driven by a suite of new technology innovation from the Internet of Things to robotics to wearables.  We refer to the use cases for this suite of enabling technology as Digital Manufacturing.