Quotes About Manufacturing

Dr. Shingo defines process as "a flow by which an object is transformed from raw material into finished product," as opposed to operations which is "the flow of tasks performed by human workers on products," the focus needs to be on improving processes and not operations

Getting to the root cause to eliminate problems and defects is close to the heart of lean manufacturing.  Just solving a problem to allow it to occur again is such a waste of human ingenuity.  Dr. Shingo would want us to spend a little more time up front, to investigate causes a little deeper to insure that the same problem would never happen again.

Lowering the river of inventory is the heart of lean manufacturing.  Keep this centered in your mind and practice it.  People have a tendency to complicate things.  It is only because they really don't fully understand and appreciate the simplicity and power of reducing inventory.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Walmart...do they make walls there?

If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we 'grow' our lives - we believe that we 'make' them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

Free trade is the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of World Government. It is the primrose path to the loss of economic independence and national sovereignty. Free trade is a bright shining lie.

Where did China get that $20 billion? From consumers at Walmart and all of us who purchase goods made in China. That $20 billion is just 1 percent of the $2 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up with the United States over two decades.

The Sacklers took the view that the same should go for OxyContin. To the degree that people are misusing the drug and overdosing, the blame lies with any number of potentially irresponsible parties—the prescribing doctor, the wholesaler, the pharmacist, the trafficker, the abuser, the addicted person—but not with the manufacturer. Not with Purdue. Much less the Sacklers.

So without alerting the FDA, much less asking for permission, Purdue started manufacturing MS Contin at a plant in New Jersey and offered it for sale in October 1984.

Paradoxically, pain seems like something done to us, though in reality we have done it to ourselves, manufacturing the sensation. Whatever we might conceive of as "pain" occurs in the mind.

One of the largest problems in getting a new design accepted by an established manufacturer is not just the 'not invented here' syndrome, but also the 'we don't have the tooling' syndrome. Why invent something new when you can simply modify what you have?

There was a cable-TV program that documented how Peeps are made, and it showed unlimited hordes of Peeps bouncing merrily down a conveyor belt, right toward the camera. I came.

The core competency of this business is really around engineering quality and manufacturing-related services. It's selling to the companies selling to the healthcare market, kind of as a B2B play.