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Featured Member
Founded
in 1963 as Sonderen Paper Box by Al and Mary Sonderen, the company has
been a successful family owned business for over 45 years.
When Al and Mary first opened for business in the 2,000 square foot
basement of Litho Art Printers in downtown Spokane, they were in the
business of making paperboard bakery trays and apparel boxes for
various bakeries and small department stores all over the Inland
Northwest. They had printing and cutting equipment but
limited automated gluing capabilities. Mark Sonderen,
President and second generation owner, recalls sitting in front of the
television with his sisters at night hand gluing some of the more
complicated carton designs.
[read more] |
 Thanksgiving
Trivia
The first Thanksgiving was in December 1621-
More
than 200 years later President Lincoln claimed the last Thursday in
November the National Holiday-
Minnesota
is the biggest producer of turkeys-
The
first NFL Thanksgiving classic game was played in 1934.
The Lions hosted the game as a gimmick to get people
to come to their games-
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Please consider the
enviroment before printing!
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Dear LMC members and supporters,
I teach
Operations Management at Fairchild AFB for Webster University - I enjoy
the interaction with the students - particularly when I challenge them
to identify opportunities to apply what we cover in class to the "real
world," especially their personal work situations. Recently,
we were discussing Lean and I challenged them to identify the central
purpose of Lean. I finally lead them to the understanding
that Lean is about "eliminating waste." Then the application
to their personal work situations: "What causes waste where you work?"[read more]
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Business
News
Structured
On-the-Job Training [SOJT]
The most cost-effective way to provide
job-task training for new employees is through structured on-the-job
training (structured OJT). For many businesses, a well
designed, implemented, and maintained structured OJT system is the most
efficient and effective way to train new employees.
Simply stated, structured OJT is on-the-job training where an "already
experienced and successful employee" uses a
company-standardized-checklist of tasks and performance criteria to
train and certify new employees. The term "certification" refers to an
in-house, company certification, and not an industry wide
certification. [read more]
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Can
Progress Toward a Lean Culture be Measured?
Albert
Einstein wisely stated that "Not everything that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted." This is
especially true in understanding your organization's progress toward
attaining the ever-elusive Lean culture.
As
a Lean practitioner, you should be keenly aware of the benefits of a
Lean culture. A Lean culture is the foundation that allows
most, if not all, Lean transformations and improvements to
occur. An organization with a mature Lean culture is
characterized by continuous customer-focused improvement and problem
solving happening everywhere, everyday, by every employee.
The closer your organization gets to that goal, the more momentum your
transformation will have.
Initially,
most organizations will have negative change momentum (think of pushing
a ball up a steep hill). If you stop pushing the ball it
immediately begins to roll downhill and you lose your hard-earned
position. As a leader, you must personally step in to stop
the negative momentum and work to regain the lost ground. [read more]
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Goodrich Counter Measure
implemented from 2009 Shipping & Receiving
Lean Event
Identifying and implementing employee health
and safety improvements is an objective for each of our Continuous
Improvement (CI) events at Goodrich. During a CI event for our
shipping and receiving area employees came up with an
excellent idea for a shrink-wrap roll holder that
reduced handling by 50%, overall travel by 60%, eliminated ergonomic
concerns and improved visibility of shrink wrap roll
inventory. Local company, J & M Fabrication produced the
finished product.[CI details here]
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Book Review
 Creating a
Lean Culture:
Tools
to Sustain Lean Conversions
By
David MannIn one sentence - if you want
your lean efforts to stick, read this book. We've
all heard the inspirational stories of those companies that become
truly lean - the incredible business performance and market share
gains, the level of engagement and work fulfillment of employees -
something just about everyone would want to be a part of. Yet
it's been repeatedly reported that less than one in twenty
organizations that attempt to become a truly lean organization
succeed. That is mostly because the technical changes or
"lean tools" used to establish flow and visual management (such as 5S,
kanban, production leveling, and so forth) are not accompanied by
social changes in the organization - which are absolutely required to
sustain and improve any lean technical change. [read more]
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Upcoming Events
LMC Events are
bold
Nov 20-
Manufacturers Round Table
Nov 26-
No meeting enjoy your Turkey!
Dec
3- Meeting-
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The Lean Scene 
