Umbrex is pleased to welcome David Sundquist with D.M. Qwist Consulting. David is an independent consultant with expertise in leading operations/manufacturing/lean transformations for clients within various industries e.g. Battery Production, Automotive and Assembly, Heavy Duty and Consumer Goods. David’s expertise lies within: Lean Manufacturing, Operations Transformations, Performance management, Project Management, Change management, Capability Building….

  Dan Markovitz provides an article that explores the ability of public US companies to operate as a wholly lean company. Can public US companies really embrace lean? Well sure, they can deploy lean tools here and there, but the whole socio-technical system that comprises lean? I don’t think so. Wall Street pressure for quarterly profits competes fiercely with lean principles, both inside and outside the company. Executives who take the long-term view and view employees as appreciating assets worthy…

  Dan Markovitz explains why time management and a shorter work week is good news for lean.   In the space of two weeks, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both ran articles on the productivity benefits of reduced work hours. The WSJ introduced us to the workers at Rheingans Digital Enabler in Germany, who only put in five-hour days, for a workweek of 25 hours. The same is true of employees at Tower Paddle Boards (at…

Dan Markovitz reveals a common problem that lean programs often face.    Boeing’s Starliner failed an important test flight two weeks ago. It was supposed to rendezvous with the International Space Station, but was unable to reach the correct orbit.   The problem with this engineering marvel? Not the complex aerodynamics, not the critical separation from the Atlas V rocket, not the all-important re-entry heat shield.  No, the problem was with the internal clock. The spacecraft’s internal clock became unsynced with…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Glenton Jelbert to our community.  Glenton does operational improvement work and data analytics. He is a lean manufacturing expert, recently helping organizations with everything from factory layouts to complete operational turnarounds. He is also a data expert. He has a PhD in Physics, and is comfortable in Excel, Access, MySQL, and Python. He uses these tools to gain operational and strategic insights out of messy data and to set up systems to do the same. He is…