Reinventing Manufacturing 

Don't reinvent the wheel. Use packaged software, and standardized approaches. When you do have to invent a new one, only do so if it will really provide competitive differentiation cost-effectively. Even then, try to design it for multiple purposes, flexibility, and reusability.

Leveraging means doing more with less. Don't invest when you can use: consigned inventories, well-planned automa­tion, human resource development, education, virtual cor­porations, cooperative resources, multi-skilled people, con­tractors, OPM (Other Peoples' Money), OPI (Other Peoples' Ideas), licensed technology and methodologies.

Many organizations intimidate their people into develop­ing overly conservative goals, reducing the perceived probability of failure. Try to remove the fear of failure (easier said than done), and encourage employees to shoot for the moon. Then, help them get the resources they need to achieve these goals, encourage controlled, conscious risk-taking, reward success, and console honest failures that occur as a result of trying hard. It's usually better to achieve half of a 50% improvement goal than all of a 10% goal.

The ideal project leader is one who can formulate and communicate a mission with inspiration, provide tools that team members need, participate with team members, identify and target opportunities and problems for action

Joe Barcy, one of our associates was leading an inventory reduction program for a client. Some of their employees lamented the fact that up to half of the items to be tracked might lack adequate decision data, so that they felt they could not proceed. Joe said, "then work on the other half!" We'd still be waiting for all of the data to be right before making a decision if we'd hesitated. Instead, improve­ments are being made daily.