I've been reading "The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement" by Liker & Franz. I think there's a connection between the stories in this book and the SWC Shell lesson that we insist is in every workshop.
The book describes Lean/6-sigma/Kaizen strategies for improving the efficiency of a business. I'm just a dumb physicist who's never worked in manufacturing, so I'm sure I don't really understand the techniques. To me, it sounds like the general practice is to have collaborative meetings, look for more efficient ways to move material across the shop floor, and look for ways to make/deliver the same (or better) product with fewer people. After this, implement and see if these ideas work. In about half of the case studies, these increases in efficiency lead to layoffs and corporate profits. Yuk! In the other half of the case studies, (this is the "Toyota Way"), instead of layoffs, the freed up capital, space, and people-hours are used to look for other places where the product/manufacturing process can be improved. In practice at places like Toyota this cycle of product/process improvement is continuous and the continuous improvement (and resource freeing) drives a productive, continuous feedback loop. What does this have to do with the shell? Why should you learn the shell? The rationale feels like the same as Kaizen - if you embrace the shell commands, you will have more free time, which allows you to do other important work and find other repetitive and mundane things to automate with Shell/python etc. If you work in operations engineering or similar and feel I have this all wrong, please educate me! Hope you are all enjoying your day. Nathan Moore Physics, Winona State
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
