performance improvement

The 5 Biggest Continuous Improvement Challenges and How the Factory Operating System Solves Them All

1. Resistance from the Shop Floor and middle managers
As any Lean or Continuous Improvement (CI) practitioner can attest to, the first problem you encounter while trying to drive changes is resistance from the shop floor – and then the management team. The resistance is often created by a fear of change and people being pushed out of their comfort zones. It also arises from conflicting agendas.

Are Your Metrics Causing You To Lose Money?

As Peter Drucker, one of the founders of the study of modern management, once said, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Rather you agree with this statement or not, the practice of measurement, or expressing things, events, and ideas numerically, is only increasing in the way we run our businesses. Metrics are critical to Continuous Performance Improvement since they provide the frame of what exactly we're working to improve.

Why Your Manufacturing Execution System Is Making Your Job Harder

So, you've spent a ton of money and who knows how much time implementing and getting people to use your Manufacturing Execution System (MES). Performance got a little better in the beginning but now it seems that things have gone right back to the old ways just with more data (a lot of which is incomplete and unreliable) and more meetings. The only change that really happened is that people got better at explaining why they're doing so poorly but still no real tangible results.