Fundamentals first, then improvement 6 questions prepare a fabricator for change

摘要

Dan Marino, president of Marino Associates in East Windsor, Conn., has talked at various events and visited numerous plants. He espouses the merits of strategies like sales and operations planning (S&OP) and the basic tenets of continuous improvement techniques like lean manufacturing. He also hears about how difficult it is for companies to change. Customers demand more and more, and everyone always seems behind the eight ball. A company may "lean out" a portion of the plant, but it stops there. The initiative isn't sustained or spread throughout the organization. Over time nothing really changes, and lean (or any other change that management puts forth) becomes just another flavor of the month.