ABSTRACT
We in North America, and especially in the United States, can sit around in conference rooms complaining about how the playing field isn’t level with, say, China and that we don’t have a fair chance to compete. We can even hope that our government is working hard by various means to have foreign governments allow their currency to float or to stop government subsidies of their products. Where else in the world are the entitlement costs for environmental health and safety, for government regulations, and for pensions and health care as high as they are in the United States? What’s fair is fair, right? Of course not. We must be good enough to compete regardless of all the obstacles that present themselves. If we wait on the government to eliminate all of the inequities, they’ll still be jawboning it with the competition on the day we close our last manufacturing plant. It’s time to pull our collective heads out of the sand and find a way to compete. The very best plants continue to prove that it can be done. How? They ask themselves questions like these:
• How can we make the labor component more productive by removing unnecessary, non-value-added labor from our processes?
