December 16, 2014 from IndustryWeek – “I sometimes find it difficult to describe what I do to friends and acquaintances who have careers outside of manufacturing and rarely give much thought to how things actually get made. To the uninitiated, if I were to say “I help manufacturers to implement continuous improvement (CI) models” or “I support companies in their production system journey,” I might as well be speaking a foreign language because, while these statements resonate with those of us who live and breathe CI every day, they don’t mean much to the rest of the world…”
180 View – We start all our projects with a kick-off meeting and there are other similarities to the NFL analogy. The article discusses the importance of “What does the business require of this operation to be successful” which we call the Critical Success Factors. We use it to identify functional requirements that will enable attainment of CSFs and also to identify the important metrics or KPIs. The article also discusses comparing metrics to the perfect or ideal standard. This is what we call the goal KPI and how we recommend determining whether a particular investment was worthwhile.