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The 7 Processes for Holiday Survival: Thanksgiving Edition

"There's a sale on Process Mapping, aisle 12!" At MPI, we help companies analyze seven fundamental processes that can deliver value to customers. This week we asked ourselves: Why limit ourselves to business processes when there’s another CRITICAL process in need of help — surviving the holidays! Introducing: The 7 Processes for Holiday Survival  – Thanksgiving Edition. At which of these processes are you great? At which are you ridiculously terrible? Analyze your performance now! Research and Development (R&D): Imagining, innovating, and designing great new products, such as your brand-new, organic, oddly flavor-free Artisanal Stuffing with Raisins recipe. We’ll [...]

By |2022-11-11T19:24:16+00:00November 11th, 2022|Growth, Holiday, Humor, People, Process|Comments Off on The 7 Processes for Holiday Survival: Thanksgiving Edition
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Doing the Gemba Walk for Digital Profits

If you know lean, you’re already familiar with the “gemba walk” (quick refresher: the Toyota/lean idea of “going to the gemba” means to observe the work in the actual place where it happens). The Digital Transformation for Manufacturers project (an MPI collaboration funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce) has everything you need to know about how to take a gemba walk that helps your company become the digital leader it was born to be. How? By deepening focus: as a team walks through a facility, it identifies a digital weakness —and then team members wrap their cross-functional brains [...]

By |2022-11-07T18:34:43+00:00November 7th, 2022|Lean, Manufacturing, Process Improvement|Comments Off on Doing the Gemba Walk for Digital Profits
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The New Math of Manufacturing

Come with me, for a moment, to the plant floor of the well-respected (albeit fictional) drill manufacturer, Grunnings. Plant Manager Vernon Dursley is evaluating his energy costs — and finds the recent increases to resemble nothing so much as bad witchcraft. As his complexion turns an unpleasant shade of purple, his Assistant Manager chimes in: “Look, it’s painful, but energy is overhead — we just have to bite the drill bit and write a check.” And so it was, for a couple hundred years (more or less). Energy costs were an unfathomable, seemingly unfixable drain on profits. It could [...]

By |2022-10-17T16:23:46+00:00October 17th, 2022|Innovation, Next Generation Manufacturing, Strategy|Comments Off on The New Math of Manufacturing
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