The rest of the day

Alright, so me and Julie just finished up with our meeting and our new assignments for the rest of the week. The meeting was in powerpoint format, where an engineer led us through the Lean manufacturing process and the Kaizen improvement process. It was all actually very interesting.
We learned how the goal of NCR was to streamline the manufacturing so it all revolves around the continuous output of goods to meet a consumers request (pull) as opposed to the previous batch manufacturing that created a large amount of goods and then had them be sold off (push). We also learned about the Kaizen productivity model. Its a Japanese word that means Continuous Improvement, and they use it in combination with Six Sigma to address the common sense kind of fixes that step by step increase efficiency. For someone who has always been a big fan of Dilbert books and comics it was pretty funny to actually hear this kind of stuff and see it in action. That being said it makes sense, and for the last few days we are hear we will be assigned to small groups of engineers to work on Kaizen projects.
So I am very excited about this, though unfortunantely I am going to have to put my quest for solitare dominance on hold. Ah well, tradeoffs. I will blog again on Friday to share how this last week at NCR and in China went and to conclude the epic adventure that has been this foreign language trip.
-Ben Goldhaber