September 2010
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When Selecting Suppliers, Know What You’re Looking For

One of the greatest challenges in selecting the right suppliers for your company is know what you’re looking for. In order to know what you’re looking for, you need to have a supplier selection strategy that is linked to the priorities and strategies of your firm. Then this strategy needs to be translated into specific requirements [...]

The New Chrysler: Ask Not What Your Suppliers Can Do For You

The government has helped bail out Chrysler. The government has not bailed out its suppliers. And now Chrysler is looking to get back in the game on the backs of its suppliers, who, if they are still in business, are not eager become lenders to their customers. Chrysler has received over $10.4B from the government so far. And now it [...]

The Baseball Supply Chain: Getting a Handle on Exploding Bats

It looks like Major League Baseball is paying attention to supply management and supplier quality. Did you ever notice how frequently major league baseball players break their bats? And have you noticed how some bats shatter violently, with pieces flying dangerously all over the place? MLB has been trying to do something about this, especially since [...]

From the Annals of Supplier Switching Costs – Another Story

In an unprecedented move, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) ordered Airbus to remove all of its old Thales speed sensors and replace them with sensors from BF Goodrich. Apparently, singling out specific suppliers for both a defective part and for replacement parts in an air crash situation has never occurred before. Thales was upgrading all [...]

Turning Supply Risk Fears into a Marketing Strategy

The pace of product recalls and supply risk fears have been increasing. I get quality news updates, and in just one week here were some of the headlines: 

Volvo Recalls Sedans in China

Body Defect Leads Volkswagen to Recall Touaregs

Georgia Company Recalls Anaheim Peppers

More Dry-Milk Products Are Recalled

South Korean Snack Firms Ordered to Recall Products

Baguettes Recalled in Canada

Medtronic [...]

Breathing Green Life into MEP

Last month, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Phil Angelides, Chairman of Apollo Alliance, along with other business, labor and clean energy leaders introduced the “Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology (IMPACT) Act of 2009,” a bill intended to facilitate the development of domestic clean energy manufacturing and production. The purpose of the bill is [...]

NUMMI: Things Are Looking Gloomy

In a recent post, “GM’s Failure: What Happened to Lean,”  I wrote about the origins of lean at GM and the NUMMI partnership with Toyota. Now, it seems that NUMMI is on Toyota’s chopping block and that Toyota seriously considering shutting down the plant. The NUMMI venture, begun in 1984, helped Toyota make a beach head in [...]

Automotive Bankruptcies: An Inconvenient Competition

Some people are heaving sighs of relief that Chrysler is emerging from bankruptcy in the arms of Fiat and that GM is officially in bankruptcy soon to emerge as leaner and meaner entities. However, many are left holding the proverbial bag. Who are they? The unsecured creditors who are lining up to salvage whatever they can [...]

Why should we care about U.S. manufacturing any more?

As the loss of manufacturers and manufacturing jobs continues during the current recession, the debate continues about whether we should even care. The U.S. is now indisputably a service-based economy. And supporters argue that the erosion of manufacturing in the U.S. is not a bad thing. I was particularly taken aback by Robert Reich’s recent blog [...]

GM’s Failure – What Happened to Lean?

As the pundits pile on the eulogies and praise from the glory days and offer endless criticisms of GM’s catastrophic decline, people will be writing books and analyzing the decline and failure of GM for years to come.

But let’s look at GM from a lean enterprise point of view. GM tried to adopt lean principles and [...]