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Why Dashboards Fail

I was just reading an editorial in DM Review magazine by Andy Hayler. It is titled "Unbalanced Scorecards". In it he looks back 20 years or so to look at the last attempt (called EIS) to provide executives with concise information on which they can take action. His point is that "the problem is ...

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Measurement in the Supply Chain

Michael Bittner just published an article titled Technology Enablers for the Lean Supply Chain in which he discusses effective methods of moving toward lean usage. The most important attitude in achieving a change that affects an entire enterprise is "we're all in this together". If you don't ta...

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Choosing Metrics

Measuring is the only way to tell if you are meeting your goals, but make sure that what you are measuring is a true indication of your business. To do this you need measurements that cover the following areas. Effectiveness - Shows how well you are meeting internal and external customer expect...

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Is Lean Sufficient?

Consultant Chris Stergiou wrote an article in the Advanced Manufacturing magazine entitled "We must rebuild our factories if we want to compete". The major point of his thoughts are: "Most manufacturers know their processes well enough that if they started from a blank slate, they could design s...

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More on Best Practices

Michael W. McLaughlin, a marketing consultant, wrote an article for MarketingProfs entitled "The Worst Thing About Best Practices " (You'll have to register to read the article). He makes some of the same points that I made last year (See entry). His main points about best practices are that: ...

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Acronyms

Acronyms have become inbedded into our daily life. I was reading an e-mail this morning from a friend and got to a three letter capitalized "word". I thought about it but couldn't figure it out and was about to look it up on-line as an acronym when I realized that it was his company name! This w...

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Deloitte, the accounting and conulting firm, conducted a major study of 650 manufacturing companies from North America and Europe in 2004. The entire study report is Mastering Innovation Exploiting ideas for Profitable Growth. There are a number of fascinating findings in this study, but one sto...

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In the April edition of DM Direct managazine, the article The Missing Link: Manufacturing Intelligence Helps ERP Deliver Expected Value makes some useful observations in selecting manufacturing software. "The heart of any manufacturing organization is the plant floor. ... Despite this, in many ...

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Yesterday I was in Chicago at the National Manufacturing Week show. I talked to the representatives of NIST about their new Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP). This program is designed to assist small manufacturers with their most critical needs. More detail is at http://www.mep.nist.gov....

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In a recent newsletter from Bob Lewis of IT Catalysts, Inc. ( www.itcatalysts.com ), he speculates on how the growth of an enterprise's market affects their Information Services organizational structure. This got me to thinking about how the speed of growth affects how you run your manufacturing...

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How do you make sure that your operations are as good as they can be? Go out and buy a "best of breed" software or hire a consultant to compare your processes to your competitors? Although I haven't heard as much about "Best Practices" recently, there still seems to be the philosophy around to t...

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Smart Decisions

Today's manufacturing environment is challenging. There is becoming less and less margin for error in decisions. How do you make the best decisions possible? With the best information possible. I was re-reading an interview in "Intelligent Enterprise" magazine with Doug Anderson, who is the CIO ...

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Robert Malone's column in the latest issue of Managing Automation (full article here) discusses how our sense of urgency about our particular tasks can cancel out the big picture view. In these days of needing distinctiveness to differentiate products, loosing a big picture view can prove tragic...

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The Support Economy

Shoshana Zuboff (of Harvard Business School) is starting a new column in "Fast Company" magazine the first of which is in the January issue Read Article Here. She is exploring the evolution of the economic model in use today. She explains that "Companies are rooted in an inward-focused business ...

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14 blog posts