Lean Educational Resources
This is meant to be a list of all the Lean educational materials that we have listened to and found helpful. If you're ever having a difficult time thinking of a way to improve our processes, this can be a helpful list.
A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons—until it was too late.
Great to see so many different areas they have have so much thought put into them. The Scooter brakes are also a fun snippet in this video. Lots of little ideas to be gotten from this, but mostly that it's clear that everyone is involved in continuous improvement in their facility. There's no way just a few people could do it all.
Year end video of all of fastcaps best improvements for 2014. Great to see that people are clearly so happy from improving their processes and making their job easy.
Year end video of all of fastcaps best improvements for 2018. A lot of good small ideas they have to make their workplaces more efficient.
Really simple comparison of a lean thinker vs. a traditional thinker. Here's a good excerpt. Traditional Thinking: If a process is working, don't fix it. Lean Thinking: Always look for ways to improve processes. Simple, but so good!
Mark Grabans lean blog is really great. He talks about hospitals implementing lean and how their employees are impacted by it.
Once you get over the whole Chick Fil A thing, this is really interesting. They don't force Lean on their franchisees and use facebook as a way to let their employees show off their improvements to other stores. How they structure their drive throughs with a get away lane is awesome.
Jeff Kaas is an excellent speaker and breaks down the seven wastes really clearly for you in this short talk.
Dr. Jeffrey Liker talks about how to teach others lean and how people often times will focus too much on the tools that lean provides instead of the mindset it should be creating.
Pierson Workholding has a lot of great videos and a good approach to lean. Simple page that walks you through lean and how it works.
Historical overview of Lean Manufacturing and how it started with Toyota.
Paul Akers books that he likes! If he likes it, it must be good.
AskReddit thread about great improvements people made at work. While this has a bunch of amazing examples of good improvements, it really shows you how conventional thinking stifles these kind of improvements as most are afraid to bring up their great work to their boss. Often times their improvements are just met with them being fired, definitely the opposite effect that we'd like to happen with Lean. Still, GREAT improvements.
Podcast about standardized work. It’s good!
Scene from Malcom in the Middle where Hal tries to improve something, but goes down a rabbit hole of fixing more and more things that bug him. He really understands the small improvements that are necessary!
A great video where paul disscusses how to asses if an idea is good or not.
Training within industry or TWI was a program started in the 1940s during WWII as a means to quickly train replacement skilled workers during wartime to take over manufacturing jobs as other workers were conscripted.
The Program focusses on training the trainers how to be a trainer, by showing them how to teach a new task. While technology has changed a lot since 1945, people have not. The methods of TWI still work, and can really help you to improve.
Training within industry blog post
Its great because they're irish.