Why TPM Initiatives Sometimes Fail

The news is always positive. Lean manufacturing techniques will improve your business. Use Kaizen, Kanban and 5S and your profits will soar anf customers will beat a path to your door. But, it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes you can spent a lot of money on implementing lean manufacturing and get little or no benefot.

Ans article from the January issue of Reliable Plant Magazine discusses why Total Productive Maintenance sometimes fails.

Metal / Nonmetal Mine Fatalities

The Louisville Courier Journal reports that although a mine safety law was passed eight months ago, "Federal regulators have been too slow in implementing important provisions of a mine-safety bill that Congress enacted last year, a key House Democrat said yesterday."

A key provision of the bill is that underground mines need to have enough breathing devices to allow miners to reach the surface in an emergency.

Mine fatalities are reported on the Maryland Center for Environmental Training web site.

http://www.mcet.org/mining/mnm/fatalgrams/index.html

Each report is linked to the OSHA web page for the incident. There you can read recommendations for avoiding such accidents.

Lean Newsletter

The lean learning center publishes a lean newsletter on a somewhat irregular schedule (a lean schedule ). Issue 8 has an article called Conversations From The Road. It is an interview with Gary Smuda who is the Director of Continuous Improvement with Technicolor. In this short, but interesting article, Gary talks about his "lean journey" from its start with a lean mentor.