Category: Uncategorized
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Going Lean: Should You Replace Your ERP System?
By Trey Jordan, Senior Software Consultant Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been around for decades. You’d think, by now, the industry would have it figured out. Yet, every year, we hear news about ERP implementations that fail. For every one of these high-profile flops, there are many, many more implementations that simply fail to live…
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The Pros and Cons of Consolidating Manufacturing ERP Systems
Managing operations through multiple manufacturing systems can be challenging, but it’s a daily reality for many manufacturers. In this post, we’ll look at the pros and cons of consolidating ERP systems – and propose an alternative. When Two Worlds Collide Whenever two or more organizations merge, they are almost always using different ERP systems.…
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Are Your Manufacturing Metrics Meaningless?
It seems not a week goes by when I don’t hear from someone in manufacturing: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Of course, there is a lot of truth to that statement, but as someone who spends all day, every day, helping manufacturers gather real-time data for better operational performance, I believe the statement…
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Fast Results Using TOC for Demand-Driven Manufacturing – Part Two
Manufacturers use constraints management first to gain the most demand-driven change Last time, we talked about focusing on enterprise improvements rather than local efficiencies using constraints management (TOC). We discussed that continuous improvement tools such as TOC, Lean and Six Sigma work like “sandpaper” on an organization’s processes, smoothing various stages of their demand-driven journey.…
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Turn Your Gemba Walk into a Power Walk
Gemba is a term that is increasingly familiar in the manufacturing world. Loosely translated from Japanese, it means “the place where the work is done.” The originators of the Gemba Walk – the practice of walking the shop floor to identify waste – knew that manufacturing process issues could not be identified or solved in…
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You are Here!
Where to Start Your Lean Journey There’s one sure-fire way to tell when someone has lived in Minneapolis long enough to be called a Minnesotan. No, it doesn’t involve rooting for the Vikings, though that helps. It’s when they can find their way around The Mall of America without a directory. Built in…
