Running operations, projects and managers
Lean, bottlenecks, project and plant integration, and what changes when you manage managers instead of people.
Hands-on notes on operations and projects
How things really get done, explained by someone doing them
I am a General Manager. I have run plants in China and Vietnam, and before that spent years managing industrial projects, from new programmes to integrating acquired plants. Here I explain in plain language what worked, what we learned, and how the mechanisms behind it work.
Notes
Latest notes
From managing people to managing managers
What changes when you stop managing people and start managing managers: three ways of leading, from matrix project teams to running a country.
Finding the slowest station on a sewing line
How to find the bottleneck on a labour-intensive sewing line when almost nothing is measured: a low-cost proxy signal, how to read it, and what it must never mean.
The requests you cannot serve map your market
A bag factory that designs buckles and foam inserts sounds odd. Listening to what customers asked for but we did not sell became the most useful market research we ever did.
What a BSCI audit asks of a factory
What an amfori BSCI audit covers, what the day looks like from the factory side, and how a buyer can read the report beyond the grade on the front page.
China+1 is a question, not a strategy
Moving production out of China is easy to say, hard to plan. Three MBA ideas, total cost, the price of a second source and policy as an input, seen from Vietnam.
New here? Start with these
A few notes that give the main ideas, in the order I would read them.
What I write about
Manufacturing in Asia
China to Vietnam, sourcing, and compliance as a commercial asset, explained through mechanisms rather than opinions on politics.
AI and data on the shop floor
Measuring with proxies, entering information once, and keeping a person in charge of every decision that matters.