Articles by Richard J. Schonberger, Ph.D.

There are two opposite ways to equip factories to respond quickly to downstream customer orders: One way is for sequential production, and the other is for concurrent production. Both draw heavily from best practices in lean manufacturing.

Design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) does well as a stand-alone methodology for simplifying product designs and lowering production costs. However, DFMA should also be hailed as a pathway to lean manufacturing.