The Richwood Report

For a historical look at the coalfields of West Virginia and surrounding states, go here. The photographs are excellent and show both past and present in the area. For a sample, featuring Cannelton Hollow, go here. An example of the photographs is the Cannelton Company Store,shown above. The picture was taken about 1919, as noted in the photograph .

Those of us who make a living making things sometimes see our work in too limited a way. We miss the significance of what we do because we don't see the bigger picture of what we accomplish. For help seeing how the manufacturing world helps everybody, go here.

Sometimes people tell us to stop and smell the roses. It might be better to stop and see them, as well. This blogger has some good observations on, well, observation. A quote:

John Burroughs, Sharp Eyes, from Locust and Wild Honey:

Nevertheless the habit of observation is the habit of clear and decisive gazing: not by a first casual glance, but by a steady, deliberate aim of the eye, are the rare and characteristic things discovered. You must look intently, and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind.

I stumbled on a great example of kaizen this week. Waffle house cooks have a sort of kanban system for keeping track of the hectic flow of orders across the grill. Imagine you are a grill cook with a continuous flow of orders coming at you at breakneck speed. They all want their breakfast like they want it. Soon. You could write it all down and refer to your notes. You could automate the system with a computer and refer to the screen. You could use the waiter's order slip and refer to it as you try to keep it with the right plates going through the line. All these methods take a lot of time just for the system itself. What is required is a way to get the right things prepared using as little time as possible on the system. In other words we want to cook(the thing that is of VALUE to the customer) instead of keep records, which is a form of WASTE, because the customer wants the food, not the records. Here is the elegant system employed at Waffle House. The comments after the article show that there is still room for improvement to continue but the system seems to be working pretty well.

Labels: kaizen, kanban, lean