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
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.
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.
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
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
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