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This best-selling book, currently in its third edition and with 1.3 million copies in print, was acclaimed by authors Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten in their new compendium The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You. Covert and Sattersten lauded The Team Handbook, noting that it “sets the standard for a functional workbook that can easily be employed in the workplace . . . the book has owned this category since the first edition was published in 1998.”

Covert and Sattersten cited the book’s clarity and its user-friendly design among the reasons why they selected it for their prestigious list, proclaiming that “this is the book you need to make your next team project a success.” These features and the book’s focus on excellence have led to the book being adopted by scores of companies as an integral complement to their Lean and Six Sigma programs, especially in today’s ever-evolving business climate.

The Team Handbook has been one of Oriel Incorporated’s premier products since it was first published. It complements Oriel’s roster of training courses, consulting specialties (including Six Sigma, Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Process Management, Teams, and Voice of the Customer), and other publications, all dedicated to the pursuit of organizational excellence.

For more than 25 years, U.S.-based Oriel Incorporated, a SAM Group Company, has been one of the world’s leading consulting and training organizations dedicated to the pursuit of business process improvement and performance excellence. Oriel offers ongoing consulting and training in every aspect of business process improvement, from the basics to the specialized tools needed to ensure customer satisfaction.

For more information on The Team Handbook or how Oriel Incorporated can help your organization get started on the path to organizational excellence, please visit www.orielinc.com, email cjersild@orielinc.com, or call 1-800-669-8326.

By William Atkinson — Purchasing, 3/12/2009

A lot of companies begin looking at Lean, Six Sigma and other efficiency improvement strategies when business tightens, as a way to reduce excess costs. But Halliburton took the opposite approach and implemented Lean Six Sigma as a way to improve its customer service in the face of growing demand.

Houston-based Oilfield services provider Halliburton has experienced significant demand growth over the last few years. While this is good news for Halliburton, it also poses some challenges—most notably, the need to improve efficiency to meet ever-increasing customer needs and capitalize on the growing demand.

Read more >>> http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA6642416.html?industryid=48372

Continue reading Halliburton pushes Lean Six Sigma to its supply base

Six Sigma has never been a cost cutting tool; however, a proper implementation of the various tools and techniques of Six Sigma can help businesses reduce the costs of operations.

Reduction of Defects and Rejections
A major factor in cutting costs is the reduction of defects. By listening to the appropriate voice of the customer (VOC), the customer requirements can be well understood.

The quality of a product is not perceived from the point of view of the person designing, manufacturing or selling it. Rather, it is determined according by the customer. By making product and process improvements from this point of view, it will lead to reductions in cost incurred due to customer rejection.

Read more >>> http://advice.cio.com/terrificideas/six_sigma_to_cut_costs

Continue reading Six sigma to cut costs

Author: Darrin Wikoff, CMRP
Issue: 3/2009

Too often in reliability engineering, we focus narrowly on equipment and equipment-related problems when tasked with removing variation from our manufacturing process. But, what about “human reliability”?

Human reliability is defined in the Springer Series in Reliability Engineering as the probability that a job or task will be completed successfully by an individual within any given stage of a process, within a given timeframe. Human error (reliability) occurs when the individual’s mental-models are not aligned with current circumstances. This misalignment is caused by the person’s prior knowledge of the process or system and the fact that the system or process has changed. So we ask the question, how can training limit variation?

Read more >>> http://www.reliableplant.com/article.asp?articleid=16220

Continue reading How does training limit variation?

March 04, 2009
by Keith Loria, Reporter

This report originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of DOTmed Business News

It has been 95 years since Henry Ford created the first assembly line. Since then, industries have concentrated on fine-tuning the process to improve manufacturing techniques. One such manufacturing innovation-called lean manufacturing, was invented by the founders of Toyota and so it is also known as the Toyota Production System.

Read more >>> http://www.dotmed.com/news/story/7993

Continue reading Go Lean: Lean Manufacturing

By TIMOTHY AEPPEL and JUSTIN LAHART

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — At a factory here that churns out plastic parts for everything from spray cans to blasting caps, laying off just one worker can be more trouble than it’s worth.

The plant, owned by Cleveland-based Parker Hannifin Corp., has become so lean over the past decade that many assembly lines run with only a handful of highly trained workers.

So while mass layoffs have driven the U.S. unemployment rate to its highest in 26 years, Parker and other companies like it are responding to the slump in more surgical ways, mainly by cutting hours and shedding temporary workers.

Rewad more >>> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123655039683165011.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Continue reading Lean Factories Find It Hard to Cut Jobs Even in a Slump

Financial institutions can up revenues and calm market volatility by reducing unnecessary waste and slashing operations expenses, according the CEB

By The Staff of the Corporate Executive Board

As market volatility drives up service volumes and costs at financial institutions, operations executives are struggling to reduce costs and improve service quality. Traditional cost-cutting strategies are failing—they more often lead to poor quality and (counter intuitively) higher costs.

Read more >>> http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/mar2009/ca2009036_859937.htm

Continue reading Lean Principles Beyond Manufacturing

Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 10:41 AM
By O.Kay Henderson

Five years ago, then-Governor Tom Vilsack asked his Department of Natural Resources to launch a “lean enterprise” effort and today, the Iowa House gave final legislative approval to a bill that establishes a permanent “lean enterprise office” for all of state government.

Representative Vicki Lensing, a Democrat from Iowa City, says “lean enterprise” principles focus on improving customer service. “Lean enterprise began in Iowa in 2003,” Lensing says. “That was at a time when we were looking to streamline and improve government.”

Read more >>> http://www.radioiowa.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=F10E1C97-5056-B82A-3743189C8994BDA0

Continue reading Streamlining government the goal of bill & “lean enterprise office”

By Jin Zhang, Real Intent, Inc.
EDA DesignLine

The manufacturing industry saw significant improvement in quality within the last few decades due to the implementation of Lean Manufacturing process and Six Sigma quality control measures.

Lean Manufacturing, also called Just-in-time (JIT), was pioneered by Toyota to reduce non value added waste in the manufacturing process through continuous improvement and producing only when needed with minimum inventory of raw materials and finished goods. Six Sigma is a well known, data driven set of standards that use in-depth statistical metrics to eliminate defects and achieve exceptional quality at all levels of the supply chain. Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma quality (Lean Six Sigma) have merged in theory and practice [1]. This new paradigm requires each employee to assume responsibility for the quality of their own work. To create higher quality, defects need to detected and fixed at the source. Quality is built and assured at each step in the process rather than through inspection at the end. Adoption of Lean Six Sigma in production resulted in the high quality of goods and services that we all enjoy today.

Read more >>> http://www.embedded.com/design/215800952

Continue reading Achieving Six Sigma Quality for IC Design

Book details how to combine lean tools to enhance CIRP news wires

In the new book “Using Hoshin Kanri to Improve the Value Stream”, leading quality expert Elizabeth Cudney constructs a complete how-to guide that any organization can employ to start a Lean effort correctly and keep it on track. Rooted in practical examples garnered over years of hand-on practice, she illustrates the key principles of lean and value and then shows how to put them to work.

Cudney points out that organizations often fail at improvement because they go after symptomatic problems rather than the faulty system-wide processes at the root of those problems. She shows how to avoid this common misstep by using value stream mapping to create a current-state map. Done properly, this map will help everyone in an organization understand just how they deliver value to customers and where flawed processes cause them to fall short.

Continue reading New Book :: Using Hoshin Kanri to Improve the Value Stream