Month: June 2026

12 June 2026

Indian auto dealers turn to lean methods to cut chaos and win back trust

Indian vehicle dealerships and service centres are adopting lean management techniques to tackle chronic delays, rework and customer dissatisfaction, aiming to bring factory-style discipline to noisy, overbooked workshops and crowded showrooms. For many dealer principals and service heads, the scene is familiar: bays are full,

Indian auto dealers turn to lean methods to cut chaos and win back trust
by Surya Narayan
12 June 2026
Indian vehicle dealerships and service centres are adopting lean management techniques to tackle chronic delays, rework and customer dissatisfaction, aiming to bring factory-style discipline to noisy, overbooked workshops and crowded showrooms. For many dealer principals and service heads, the scene is familiar: bays are full,
How to Draw a Process Flow Diagram Without Overthinking It
by Surya Narayan
27 May 2026
Most teams we work with already know their processes are messy. What they don’t always know is where the mess actually lives. A process flow diagram is one of the simplest ways to find out. You don’t need fancy software, a design background, or a
The Quiet Foundations of Lean: What Modern Manufacturing Still Owes to Juran, Deming, and Drucker
by Surya Narayan
25 May 2026
Walk into almost any modern factory today and you will hear familiar phrases. Lean manufacturing. Continuous improvement. Quality systems. Flow. Productivity. Just-in-Time. Bottom-up problem solving. These ideas are now so deeply embedded in industrial thinking that many assume they were always there. They were not.
The 7M Process Assessment: Why Most Operational Problems Are Hiding in Plain Sight
by Surya Narayan
11 May 2026
Walk into any factory on a difficult morning and you’ll hear the same conversation. A line is down, a customer is escalating, a shipment is at risk, and somewhere near the machine three people are pointing at a fourth one who isn’t in the room.
The Wartime Training Method Quietly Powering Today’s Lean Factories
by Surya Narayan
30 April 2026
On factory floors, a training method born inside the United States War Department in the 1940s is once again teaching supervisors how to cut defects, raise output and keep their best people. It is called Training Within Industry, or TWI, and after eight decades, its
The Fishbone That Changed Everything
by Surya Narayan
23 April 2026
A human story behind the Ishikawa diagram Have you ever sat in a meeting where something went wrong and everyone started pointing fingers? The machine broke, the supplier was late, the new guy made a mistake, and suddenly no one agrees on anything. An hour
Standard Work Is Killing Your Improvement Culture. Here’s Why We Still Teach It.
by Surya Narayan
15 April 2026
We teach our clients Standard Work every day. And every day, we also teach them why Standard Work alone will never be enough. This sounds like a contradiction. It is. And it is the most important contradiction in Lean. Here at True North Lean, we
The New Face of Kaizen and Lean: Trending Techniques Reshaping the Future of Work
by Surya Narayan
12 April 2026
Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, has been quietly transforming workplaces for decades. But in 2026, it looks nothing like it did ten years ago. Driven by artificial intelligence, connected factories, and a growing pressure to do more with less, Kaizen and Lean methodologies