What is going on in grocery retail?

This is a thought-provoking piece on innovations in grocery retail. 

Farmhouse Market in particular caught my eye. It's a shop in Minnesota that lets customers use a key code to enter and shop 24/7. You can buy groceries alone. There is no on there to help, no on there to watch you, no one there to check you out. For me it flips the downside of zero staff—the fact that no one can help you—into an upside—you can shop anytime you'd like. Many large grocery stores let you shop 24/7 too, but having the option to shop in a smaller shop close to home with better food and less carting around through endless aisles...it sounds compelling. It also upends the Amazon Go grocery test where they hung a zillion dollars worth of cameras watching every move in the effort to let you shop without cashiers. That model is crazy expensive and freaks many people out that they are turning the act of buying cereal into Orwell's 1984. Instead, this couple installed a fifty dollar lock. And Big Brother isn't watching.

One emotion that staff-free retail invokes is trust. Do we believe customers will steal if left unattended? I lived in post-communist Slovakia for a year just after the Berlin Wall fell. The way retail worked there was utterly devoid of trust. In many shops you had to wait in a queue and ask for someone to get your item for you. To buy some noodles I would wait, then point at a box of pasta behind a counter and ask for someone to get it for me. Part of the justification for this nonsense was communism's mission to maximize employment. Jobs for everyone, jobs doing everything. A job getting you a box of pasta. A job handing you a piece of toilet paper at the bathroom (I'm not making that up). But another reason was trust. Since everything was owned by the state, people probably felt about as bad stealing as people do cheating on their taxes in America. A little wouldn't hurt, right?

I haven't thought about what that experience meant to me for years. Then I read this article on Chinese ecommerce. It is fascinating. (I'm sorry it's behind the New Yorker's firewall, if you'd like a copy I can send you a PDF.) It had loads of interesting news. For example, if you're like me and thought Amazon's drone special on 60 minutes was a PR stunt intended to deflect holiday attention from the working conditions described in an undercover Mother Jones article, you may be surprised to learn that they were just copying the Chinese who already use delivery drones. Who knew? But it was the author's own experience coming to America that hit home for me. She is a Chinese immigrant and described shopping for the first time in America after, like me in Slovakia, having to queue-and-ask shop in China. Here is her description of the marvel:

I can still remember the first visit my mom and I made to a Stop & Shop in New Haven, Connecticut, soon after we moved to the U.S., in 1992. I interpreted the unguarded aisles of open shelves as a sign that everything was free. I’d never heard the word “supermarket” before, and it seemed likely that “super” indicated a market where no money was necessary. My mother was awed that store employees, instead of trailing our every move as they did in China, seemed indifferent to our presence. How had shoplifting not bankrupted the establishment? What sort of society would allow such a risk? 

I had always thought of the Slovak model as weird. Here was someone describing how she felt the model I grew up with was weird. I took our get-it-yourself shopping for granted. But a hundred or so years ago, we shopped in America like they did in Slovakia, like they did in China. We lined up in a queue and asked. It made me realize that, of course, duh, retail changes. In high school I had a job at a video rental store. (It was there I watched Better off Dead about a hundred times.) That job no longer exists—for anyone. People don't rent videos from stores. Blockbuster used to employ almost 60,000 Americans. Where did they go? What do they do now?

Of course retail is going to change. Here is a mind boggling list of recent grocery innovations alone. How else will it change? Will it go backwards, like it's done recently adding delivery, something our grandparents took for granted? What will it add? What will it eliminate? Will we eliminate  the next queue — lining up to have people take our money? It seems the answer is inevitably Yes. There are many places, like CVS, where we line up and a machine takes our money. Or there are shops like Apple —or Zingerman's Mail Order, during our warehouse sale — where almost anyone walking around can take your money. There's no need for a single queue. Amazon wants their invisible app to take your money at Amazon Go. Surely that's just a stage, too.

But all that payment stuff, in context, seems like small potatoes now that I think about it. That's just the last part of retail. The money. There is so much more. One of the cornerstones of Toyota's lean operation tools, kanbans, came from how American supermarkets replenished shelves. That idea, born in retail, transformed manufacturing around the world. What else will come from retail? What else will come to retail?  How will we react to it? 

Recent reading

California, Coffee and Cancer: One of these Doesn't Belong.

California is considering putting cancer warnings on coffee. The reason is that it contains a compound called acrylamide that causes cancer in rats in large doses. The problem is acrylamide is also present in half the foods we eat. An article that makes a good case for the public health risks of over-warning about a problem.

It's not about running a pick and pack food line, but it might as well be. Explanations—with aniumated illustrations—about the systems and culture behind slowdowns on New York City's subway.

Do you think that online site changed its prices just for you? Maybe it did. How dynamic pricing works. 

The crazy story of why the fax machine is the way all doctors talk to each other

"The Obama administration spent upward of $30 billion encouraging American hospitals and doctor offices to switch from paper to electronic records. The program was a wild success, in one respect. The number of hospitals using electronic records grew from 9 percent in 2008 to 83 percent in 2015, a huge change in less than a decade. 

But the program didn’t account for a critical need: sharing. Hospital and doctor offices generally remain unable to transfer electronic information to other hospitals and doctor offices. Billions of dollars later, they are left printing out documents and faxing them."

From the article The Fax of Life.

I was wondering how fax machines were doing since Office Space!

The article is a fascinating look at yet another hunk of waste that fills our health care, helping to make the U.S.A.’s health system one of the most expensive on the planet. (I’ve written about another waste, called coding.) You know this particular waste from visiting a new doctor and filling out those endless forms, but let's lay it out:

1. You enter your patient information on one of their faded clipboard forms

2. Someone in the office types what you wrote into a computer 

3. When another provider requests your info, they print it out and fax it

4. The other provider enters that info into their computer by hand — or with a "fax reader"

Expensive to retype all that? You bet. But even worse, I'd suggest, is that I count at least three chances for something to be entered wrong. If there's even a slight chance of entering any particular piece of information wrong, the sheer amount of data to be entered and the times it must be re-entered means the likelihood of something on your medical record being incorrect is pretty darn high. I'd say it's nearly certain. Hopefully it's not something critical. 

This is how you can have a health care system like ours that is both more expensive AND worse than almost any other industrialized nation. Or, as my CFO Ron Maurer might put it, "You can get better health care, but you can’t get more expensive."

Visual management, kindergarten style

Toyota's lean operations system emphasizes making work and data visible inside the workplace. It part what's been meant by the term "visual management". It's an idea you can see in practice in any kindergarten. And no one has more fun with it than them!

Recent reading, design edition.

Explaining graphic design to four year olds.

A comparison of Lush and Body Shop's website. Hat tip to Joseph Richardson.

An incremental design improvement, made over a weekend kaizen event, and the result is a machine that has outlasted four "improvements". A great article on why the B-52 is still the main big plane for the U.S. armed forces. 

Cruise ship lean

 Changeover times a zillion: a 6,000 passenger cruise ship comes into port for a same-day turnaround. A great article about the logistics of changeover for the biggest cruise ships in the world. Some excerpts about eliminating motion, transport and waiting waste:

To prevent long immigration control lines from forming, departures are staggered over a few hours. Passengers begin to leave their cabins about 7 a.m. and must be off the ship by 10:30 a.m. The main bottleneck is juggling the flow of bags. Passengers are handed color-coded tags for their luggage, which is collected the night before the ship reaches the port.

The ship recently received four out of five stars on CruiseCritics.com for the whole trip; the embarkation process was rated five out of five by most reviewers

They also figured out a way to clean rooms faster by borrowing from techniques used in auto manufacturing. The company conducted time and motion studies on their workers to identify where they could be more efficient.

On turnaround day, they have a precise list of tasks to perform. They first take out the dirty linen and towels and line them up in the hallways in green and red bags. The efficiency specialists decided that bedsheets and towels should be separated before they are sent to the laundry room.

Attendants work alone, except when they fit new sheets to the beds, when they pair up. That task should take three to five minutes at most, said Edna Pli, the head housekeeper. Thanks to this precise flow, 189 housekeepers can get more than 2,700 rooms ready by noon.

Hat tip to my friend Bill W who is engineering a sculpture for the sister ship. It's similar to this one his company Hypersonic did in Massachussets.

When I introduce a new product how much should I make? Here's an idea: zero.

You've got a brand new product. You've never sold it before. In fact, no one has ever really sold anything quite like it. Also, it's not really one new product. It has many variations—color, size and so on—so it's more like dozens of new products.

Here's your problem. How many of each kind should you make?

It's a classic manufacturing dilemma. The typical approach is to guess. No one calls it guessing of course. You dress up the process to make it seem like you're not guessing. You have math and formulas. You have spreadsheets. You title the spreadsheets "forecasts" which is another word for "guesses" but sounds way more scientific. And you are wrong. Always. You make too many of some versions, too few of others.

Another approach is to not make any—at first. You wait until one is ordered, then build it to order. Sure, you have to have all the components on hand so those aren't built to order, but most of the components are probably shared between the different variations so it's not that big of a deal. The big benefit is that you never have the wrong level of finished goods inventory. It's always zero. The only products that exist are the ones that are already paid for.

Apple introduces their watch this week. Build-to-order is the approach that some believe they are taking. There are demo versions of watches out there but, when you buy one, the order goes to China and someone in a pink dust suit starts making your watch. 

Will Apple keep doing this forever? I don't think so. For one, FedExing a single watch at a time out of China is expensive. Another reason is that build-to-order creates a long lead time for the customer—days, if not a week or more (though Apple doesn't seem to care much about long lead times when they introduce products, to some extent it appears to be their strategy). If Apple does build to order they're probably doing it to learn about the demand. Once they see which versions sell in what quantities they can begin to build inventory ahead of time.

What do lean operations and New York bodegas have in common?

New York sometimes gets a bad rap for a mythical, brusque, who-cares kind of service, but speaking personally, I've almost never experienced it. What I've had instead usually combines professionalism (on-time, accurate, everyone says "sir" a lot) with individual customization. Take this instance.

Recently I stopped by the closest bodega to my house for a couple cans of beer as I do from time to time. They have a big selection and I always hope they'll have Heineken in a can but they almost never do. So I chatted with the guy who appears to be kind of like an owner — you know, he was the kind of person who acted like one whether he was or not —and asked if he'd take suggestions for beers. "Of course!" he said and agreed with me, "Heineken in a can is so much better!" He got the attention of the other guy in the shop and told him, "Let's get a couple cases tomorrow." This is 10pm at night. Next day, they were there.

That's what a corner store used to feel like. Or so I imagine. Frankly, I've' never experienced many corner shops in Michigan. In one way it's weird that there's this level of personalization in the biggest city in America. On the other hand, there are a lot of factors about shopping in New York that, when thought through, make its personal service seem not so odd.

In New York, everyone shops in the immediate vicinity of where they live because it's a pain to travel long distances hauling stuff on foot. You don't have a car and you have to carry everything yourself so you shop in small batches. This is a key factor that, like small batches in lean operations elsewhere, leads to beneficial and unexpected results. Because you shop in small batches you'll often be in the same shop several times a week.

The shops are different than many other cities, too—smaller, often run by adults, not the teenagers and college students you see working in big box stores elswhere America. The staffs don't turn over very much. I'm not a guy who is super chummy with everyone when I shop but it's telling that I know the names of the person who runs the laundromat, the florist, the wine shop, the cafe, several restaurants, the bodega owner and probably a few others I'm forgetting. In Ann Arbor I knew maybe two of the names of the people who ran their shops—Bob Sparrow the butcher and Mike Monahan the fishmonger. (They were there when I shopped.) Ann Arbor is a town a fraction of the size of New York but, to me, felt far more anonymous

Anyway, this is not meant to be a plug for New York. I wanted to point out a couple things. One is that smaller shopping batch sizes, one of the principles of lean, lead in this case to greater personal contact. That personal contact ultimately, in my case (and I know I'm not alone), led to better and more customized service. That service was not administered by a survey or a some other process. It was a question, an answer, and and act—all done immediately, just in time, on demand. It's a powerful way to run a business. These are great lean skills, hard to replicate and some of the reasons that, in spite of CVS and Rite Aid and other national chains trying to make a dent in the commerce here, small owner-operated bodegas in New York thrive.

A lesson in lean visual management from Michelangelo

The artist's visual grocery shopping list, circa 16th Century. Hat tip to Spike.

Recent Reading, Multimedia Edition

What the hell happens after you click submit? Radiolab makes a masterful edit of Mac McClelland's amazing Mother Jones story of being a picker in a giant fulfillment warehouse. Hat tip Betsy Bruner.

Inside the world's largest pasta maker.

A leathermaker gives a lesson on how to knock off his own product. A sly way to advertise., hat tip Tom Root.

Recent Reading, Charity Edition

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity....as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

Eye-opening writing on the "Charitable-Industrial Complex," by Warren Buffet's son Peter.  

At a soup kitchen in Harlem, Toyota’s engineers cut down the wait time for dinner to 18 minutes from as long as 90. At a food pantry on Staten Island, they reduced the time people spent filling their bags to 6 minutes from 11. And at a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where volunteers were packing boxes of supplies for victims of Hurricane Sandy, a dose of kaizen cut the time it took to pack one box to 11 seconds from 3 minutes...“I never thought that what we needed were a bunch of engineers,” Ms. Purvis said. “In our world food is king, but we didn’t know that the queen would be kaizen.”

What if instead of donating money you give operations consulting? Toyota donates lean expertise.

Batching Check

One myth about lean is that it perfects processes so well you don't need to check for accuracy. Wrong. It'd be nice if it did, but it doesn't. The checking station doesn't go away. It just stops being a station. Instead you check everywhere, all the time.

Here's an analogy that might help explain what I mean. 

Let's say you're out shopping. Something costs $35 and you pay $40. You get change. You count it. You have $4. You correct the clerk and they give you another dollar. You go to the next store, pay for something, count the change, correct it if it needs correcting, and so on.

This seems totally normal because we all do it every day. Now imagine another scenario where you didn't count your change at each stop. Instead you waited till you got home and then counted all the change from all the shops to see if you had the right amount.

That's batching. That's what we do now in production at the check station by batch checking the pickers. It's also — sneak preview, thanks Betty! — something we're looking at eliminating next year.

I see batches: CVS Delivery

There's a CVS on my block that gets deliveries in a big batch once a week on Mondays. Here's today's. A fifty-five foot truck parks on the street and the trailer's lift loader drops pallet after pallet onto the sidewalk. It blocks the street for hours as people and hi-los wait for each other to pass and the crew sort the boxes to check them in.

Every other shop in my neighborhood gets these kinds of deliveries multiple times a week, some multiple times a day. The small batch deleveries take minutes, not hours, since they can be tossed off the back of a truck onto a hand cart and wheeled directly into the store to be checked in immediately by the regular crew, not a special Mondays-only check-in team.

These are CVS's operational problems, which are painful enough to contemplate. The deeper problem, to me, happens inside the shop with the customers. CVS's shelves always look half empty. That's because 50% of the time I visit the week is half done and the shelves are picked over, waiting till next Monday's delivery.

Bigger batches lead to more out of stocks. This is one of Lean's counter-intuitive learnings. Its remedy: order less. They key is to order less more frequently, so you can respond to demand. Do that and you'll be in stock more often.

Don't frequent deliveries cost more? Maybe, in some cases. (With all the extra equipment and check in time I see down the street each week at CVS I'm pretty sure the answer is "No" for them.) But ignore cost for a moment. More frequent deliveries mean items are in stock more often. That means you make more sales. In other words, more frequent deliveries increase sales. This lean thing is not just powerful for improving process and the bottom line, but for improving sales and the top line, too.

10 Awesome Effects Single Face Racks Will Have

Last week we got our first single facing rack for picking. Where we used to have whole cases now we have single bottles. On its face this seems like one of those operational improvements that only an operational nerd would like. Well, that's probably true. It also seems rather incremental. We used to put whole cases in a rack, now we put a single bottle, big whoop. It doesn't seem like that much. That's not the case. This is huge.

This is one of those rare incremental lean improvements that will have tremendous and far-reaching effects. You don't get big leaps like this often in operations. When you kick off a lean transformation you get major improvements by going from batch to flow and implementing pull systems like marketplaces with kanbans. Those usually have huge space-savings and labor-cost improvements. Jaw-dropping numbers, like our first year labor savings of over 30%. From then on the changes have smaller bottom line effects. Sometimes they feel nonexistent. (We've had years after our initial lean transformation where our labor cost as a percent of sales went up, not down.) Sometimes it can feel like two steps forward one step back. This, on the other hand, is like twenty steps forward.
 

We can't single face every product—yet. Maybe 150 of our 800 items to start with. That number will go up over time, though, as we figure out how to make more jars flow and not break in the rack, unprotected by their case.

10 Effects Single Face Racks Will Have

1. Cases are usually 3 products wide. That was the width of a pick slot. Now a pick slot is one product wide. We just cut our floor space for this section by two thirds.

2. Since pickers only need to pick the first product and never have to reach back into a case we don't need to size the racks to have reach-in space. The vertical space between shelves can shrink. We can fit more shelves in, perhaps up to 25% more. We just cut our floor space by another 25%.

3. Combine the above effects and this section's pickers will walk 75% less.

4. We can add hundreds of new foods to the pick line without moving to a new building (we still have back stock space to work out first).

5. Pickers won't have to sort in the box (visually) for the next product.

6. Pickers can grab a product out of this rack more easily and quickly than out of a case.

7. Pickers can get visual cues about address slots since the products have color and shape variation, unlike cardboard boxes.
 
8. Pickers can spot problems like dents and leaks more easily.

9. Pickers won't have to manage the recycling of cardboard boxes.

10. The rack is faster to adjust so we can add items, delete items, and move items more cheaply. Now a fast mover can move to an easier pick location quickly. We can re-locate a super fast mover to the front of the pick line so it's picked and done and doesn't pass through all the pick stations. Or we can spread fast movers in the holiday so we even the workload at pick.

The Cloud and Batch Size

The cloud seems to have lean effects on software development:

In the Wintel world, new versions of Microsoft Windows came out every few years, with major software projects tied to desktops and laptops. By contrast, in less than five years Apple has announced six versions of its mobile operating system. Google’s operating system for cloud-connected laptops, called Chrome, is updated every six weeks.

Full article here.

Biographies, Jobs, Apple and Lean

 

For some reason or other I've been on a bit of a biography kick recently. I read Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood Bones and Butter (great writing, especially in the Blood section), Keith Richards' Life (only read it if you really care about the Stones). I even got to see Harry Belafonte interviewed live by Charlie Rose about his new biography, My Song (don't miss Harry if you ever get the chance). Most recently I closed the cover on Bob Dylan's Chronicles, which has unmatched art and mood.

I also read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. To be honest, even though I read regularly about Apple, I was wary of this book. It came bearing loads of hype, most of it for obvious reasons. There were many book reviews that focused on the personality of Jobs, especially his potent dickishness (spoiler alert! he is often a monumental asshole!). Then there's the story about his first daughter and Joan Baez and his wacky diets and yada yada yada. I feared the dirt would outnumber the diamonds. Any way I cut it, though, Jobs turned out to be a powerful book.

Steve Jobs is not promoted as a business book. I certainly didn't read it expecting to glean anything that could relate to my company. But it is and I did. (That's one of the reasons the book is so powerful—it's really several books and stories combined in one, written masterfully.)

Jobs was quoted many times as saying he wanted to create a great business, not just a great product. There are a number of examples on how he did that but two really struck me, especially as they relate to some Toyota manufacturing's lean concepts.

The first was about visioning. Under Jobs the Apple leadership team had a long term visioning meeting every Monday. Not just once a decade (what we do at Zingerman's for our ZCoB-wide vision), not once a year (as many individual businesses do at Zingerman's), but once a week. In part this was driven by the industry they were in. Technology moves fast so I guess visions should too. But they weren't talking about what was going to happen in six months or a year. This was a vision meeting for the next ten years, talking about what's way on the horizon. The meeting didn't last for a few minutes. Visioning wasn't just an agenda item where someone talked briefly. It was an entire meeting itself. It could go on for hours. They practiced visioning frequently and regularly—by reducing its batch size and interval. And they turned out machines that were many steps ahead of everyone else with fewer problems. I think the two things are very much related.

The second example was about product development iteration. Jobs had a daily check-in on product development. He visited design director Jony Ive and his team every afternoon to see how things had gone since yesterday. During this visit they didn't look at drawings or images on a computer. They held an object. A prototype of the thing they were designing. The group would play with it, talk about it, make tweaks. Then he'd come back the next day.

Now I've been designing for a long time and am fully cocooned in it. I fully appreciate that this may be one of those things where most folks will say, "Yeah, so?" But I'll just say this kind of shit just does not happen elsewhere, anywhere. A design director might see a new prototype once a month. If it's a fast moving project, maybe once a week. But once a day—no way.

Take in the sheer number of iterations. Let's say the iPhone had 3 years of development. Take away vacations and weekends (which I doubt there were many of) and you've still got around 750 design iterations for the iPhone. I doubt if any of Motorola's phones have a quarter that many. That means Apple gave itself at least 4 times as many chances as Motorola to get things right. It wasn't a coincidence that they made a great phone. Yes, they had talented people and Jobs was a stickler for detail (though to some extent I think it's overstated—every designer I know is a stickler for detail; if they weren't they wouldn't be in the business). But forget Ive and Jobs for a moment. They're not the only thing that made such an amazing device. It wasn't a hero product, one that came down from the Creator on the Mountain. It was a sisyphean labor of iterations, albeit one with better results.

In lean terms, they practiced go see — the idea that you have to stand in front of the real thing to understand problems. They also modified it frequently. To put that in lean speak, they reduced the batch size of design by going to daily iterations, not monthly. In doing so they got a better product with fewer errors. Sound familiar?

Education is a Push

In lean terminology, there are pushes and there are pulls. Pushes are bad and to be avoided. They're when you make something for a customer — or the next process in your sequence — regardless of whether it's needed. Pulls are good. They're when the customer — or the next process — asks for something and then you make it.

Classroom education is largely done as a push. The process usually pushes a class identical units of information — lectures, homework and reading — regardless of any individual's specific need. (Sometimes you get time for questions and answers, which is an example of pull.) Anyone who's dozed through a class knows push education can be boring as hell. And often not terribly effective.

Here's some interesting news about a school that's trying to make education a pull process,  one that responds to what the student needs when they need it. They are creating classes that are customized daily. It's an interesting experiment.

I see batches: The Death Star

  

 

In Star Wars the Empire batched their military like crazy. For example, they created the Death Star. Like most batching, it was probably sold in a meeting with the Emperor as "an efficient choice." After all, why do lots of small attacks one at a time when you can do them all at once out of a laser beam as big as a planet?

We all know how that story goes. A typically tragic tale of batching. One mistake—that thermal exhaust port—was multiplied by a zillion.

More on batches here.

This is how the phone call goes when you have to tell your boss the Death Star blew up.

I see batches: Nuclear Power

  

In lean operations terminology a "batch" happens when you're not producing something one at a time. It's when you make multiples of something identical all at once. Usually batching is done to be more "efficient," efficiency being defined as the lowest production cost per unit.

Like binge drinking (another form of batching), batches have strange side effects. One is that when things go wrong they go really wrong. Any error is multiplied by the size of the batch. The bigger the batch, the bigger the error.

You can spot batches everywhere. For example, electricity is often created in large batches. Whether it's made from coal, natural gas, or hydroelectricity, almost all electricity is made in the biggest batch possible. And nuclear power plants are the biggest batchers of them all. It's not one home making electricity for itself. It's one plant making electricity for multiple cities. A typical nuclear plant produces enough power for nearly a million homes.

The nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan made me think about batches and how, when you batch radioactive power generation, you can create some horrific errors, multiplied.

Uniqlo: Using Toyota Style Systems to Sell Clothes

 

Uniqlo is a low price rather stylish clothing company that, if you don't know by now, you probably will soon. They've been a certain kind of phenomenon in New York since they landed in Soho a couple years ago. Now they're set for expansion across America. There is an excellent article about them in New York Magazine.

They're from Japan. I don't know if that fact — that they're from the same country as Toyota — has some influence, but they have some key similarities to the car maker. They use operations to drive sales. They have lean style systems to make, buy, stock and sell clothes. They experiment and expect to have lots of failures. They have open book management — every employee can see the sales every day, down to the number of each item sold. They also have a freaky clone army approach, which, when you read about it, may give you the heebie jeebies. 

In the end, the article is mostly fun, especially if you are interested in fashion. But it's got some good ideas to steal for anyone who manages operations, too.

Full disclosure: I am a fan. I'm not going to lie, their stuff is pretty good.

Link to the full article here.