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How to design the products our customers want
Nintendo is but one company with mixed product launches: runaway hits or expensive knickknacks. If only there was a more structured approach to product development! This post summarizes my notes on the matter. The tools available to reduce waste (Lean) and to analyze the process based on data (Six Sigma) connect to existing products. How →
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The end-to-end perspective and its (likely) impact on procurement
Supply Chain Management (SCM) connects to almost every business operation: from financial streams to packaging, to the sequence of tasks, to where and when to execute them. SCM is core and center to the big overarching trends in the industry, from near-shoring, to digitalization, Industry 4.0, and the quest for resilience. In recent years, practitioners →
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Lean Management: How to streamline your production
When MIT’s James Womack came back from Japan he wanted to document how Toyota Motor smashed the competition. The MIT team wrote a book on the company’s production system The Machine That Changed the World (here a review): Toyota’s production was customer-driven, cost-savvy, co-created, and very effective. In Womack words: it was lean. This entry →
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Process improvement theory: the Gospel of Six Sigma
The pursuit of process efficiency Let there be no misunderstandings: six sigma is a process improvement tool. It is a management tool to improve the efficiency of operations by reducing waste and cycle time. This post will focus on the philosophy and not the methodology of quality management. The philosophy of process improvement Six sigma →
