Jill Jusko Labor Operations Leadership blog

A Little Bit of Everything: Lean Leadership, IW Best Plants and a Request

March 28, 2014

Have you downloaded the 2014 IW Best Plants competition application? Visited our Ask the Expert: Lean Leadership feature? Read the latest column from new contributor John Dyer? Have you shared what you'd like to see on www.IndustryWeek.com?

Jill Jusko Blog

I'm not sure if many of you know this, but I'm the coordinator of the IndustryWeek Best Plants competition, our annual salute of North American manufacturing excellence. What too often goes unrecognized in the challenge of meeting daily, sometimes overwhelming deadlines, are the great things happening on manufacturing plant floors, accomplished by teams of smart, engaged workers. The IW Best Plants competition is one small way we try to bring those great things to a wider audience. We named the 2013 IW Best Plants winners earlier this year, and my hope is that you read those stories and picked up some good ideas to improve your own operations.

Industryweek Com Sites Industryweek com Files Uploads 2014 03 Best Plants New 595

My hope also is that some of you know that you have manufacturing plants doing great things that deserve recognition, as well. If you do, then consider entering the 2014 IW Best Plants competition. The 2014 IndustryWeek entry forms are now available, and I urge you to download one and look it over. Then decide. I wanted to mentioned a couple of other things as well:

Ask the Expert: Our Ask the Expert: Lean Leadership feature has launched. If you haven't reviewed Larry Fast's responses to several great questions, I urge you to do so. Even more, please ask any lean leadership questions you have. Without your questions, this Ask the Expert column doesn't succeed.

Meanwhile, another Ask the Expert will launch next week on the topic of reshoring. If you want to get any reshoring-related questions in the queue prior to the debut, just send them to me at [email protected].

New Contributor: And if you haven't read any John Dyer's columns for IndustryWeek, take a moment and give one a try. You'll be back for more. He recently started contributing to IW. His most recent piece is Why Do We Fear Improvement?

And the request I mention in the headline to this post? Drop me a line. Tell me what you want to read about in the context of lean manufacturing, quality, performance metrics, and other continuous improvement themes. Or maybe there is a company you have heard is doing good stuff in the area of xx or xx. Le me know. I'll see what I can find out.

I look forward to hearing more from you.

About the Author

Jill Jusko Blog | Senior Editor

Focus: Operations & Workforce

Email: [email protected]
Follow Jill on Twitter: @JJuskoIW

Call: 216-931-9311

Senior Editor Jill Jusko covers strategies and best practices in manufacturing workforce and operations leadership. She provides information about workforce compensation strategies, education and training, employee engagement and retention, and teamwork. Her coverage of operations excellence spotlights companies that have achieved world-class results in quality, productivity, cost and other benchmarks by implementing the latest continuous improvement and lean/Six Sigma strategies.

Jill also coordinates IndustryWeek’s Best Plants Awards Program, which annually salutes the leading manufacturing facilities in North America.

Jill has also served as the editorial project director for the IW/MPI Census of Manufacturers. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University.