Related Posts

• What's Love Got To Do With It? EVERYTHING!

  At Cambridge, we speak of having love for our fellow employees often. This isn’t the romantic love, though today is Valentine’s Day, but rather, the sort of love that is built upon mutual respect, admiration, and encouragement to learn and grow personally. Our playbook even includes the phrase “We express unconditional love and high expectations while behaving with care, courage, integrity and respect.” It might not be instinctive to recognize love in the workplace, but when you are aware of it, we’d bet that it is, in fact, surrounding you. We are going to share some examples of how love manifests itself into everyday life in our workplace, so that anyone reading this blog may start to recognize and appreciate simple acts around them, or simply start to institute the simple acts themselves. Colleagues clappingto show appreciation for each lean video– the 2 second improvements and the ones that took much, much longer. The men and women on the activities committee getting here 2-3 hours early on the days they cook breakfast to welcome new hires and celebrate birthdays. ...

• Growth Starts With Humility

  Our organization has embarked on an employee engagement path that has literally caught fire throughout the company. Several Cambridge Engineering, Inc. production managers embraced the LEAN philosophy espoused by Paul Akers in his book, 2 Second Lean: How to grow people and build a lean culture. Our production team’s focus from the beginning has been on training people how to think differently. Many sophisticated books have been written on the LEAN topic. Paul’s book is not one of them. Paul details a path towards employee engagement that everyone can understand. As leader of the sales team, I have watched the trans-formative power of a LEAN mindset with our Ops team and have been inspired to apply this thinking to my life. While our operations team has a head start in embracing these teachings and this thinking, there is a powerful message at the very beginning of the book that applies to all leaders that are considering the necessary strategies and tactics to grow their business, grow their market share, increase pipelines, improve closing ratios or improve processes and flow ...

• Choosing the Right Heating System for your Facility

  Is the heating bill for your plant or warehouse too high? What about cold dock door areas and unbalanced temperatures? Is negative building pressure a problem? Do your employees complain about it being too cold making it harder for them to do their job? Do you have high maintenance costs from existing heating equipment? These are just a few common problems that result from selecting the wrong heating system, misplacing your heaters so they can’t reach their full potential or using obsolete technology. What factors determine the best space heating system? Everyone wants a heating & ventilating system that meets their unique requirements at the lowest total cost. Before selecting a heater, define the heating/ventilating requirements and understand all the cost factors that determine the true lowest total cost solution for a specific facility. BOILER SYSTEMS One of the oldest forms of heating, boilers have been in existence since about the 1800’s and are still a preferred system of heating in large industrial facilities where remote plants deliver steam and hot water to satellite locations to circulate through heat exchangers. These exchangers ...

• Retrofit Old Inefficient Heating Equipment with Cambridge HTHV Technology

  As an HVAC contractor who services commercial and industrial accounts you know that one of the biggest complaints that you hear from your clients is the high cost to heat their facility. You know this is especially difficult when they are still using old inefficient heating equipment. As a manufacturer of high efficiency industrial heating equipment we thought we would share a video with you about our ability to help you reduce your clients energy bills using Cambridge equipment. In this video Marc Braun describes the three most common heating solutions (Unit Heaters, Boilers & Air Rotation units) that are a prime target for replacing with a Cambridge High Temperature Heating and Ventilation (HTHV) solution.  If you interested in learning more about retrofit opportunities using Cambridge HTHV equipment visit our website at www.cambridge-eng.com to contact us.

• Spend a Few Minutes With Your Label Maker - and Reap the Benefits

  One might consider labeling the items you use in your everyday workspace part of the low-hanging fruit when starting in your lean journey.  As simple as it seems, it could also be one of the most important. It’s easy to underestimate the time spent looking for a tool, or referencing it against a process checklist to make sure it’s correct. But, imagine you have been assigned a task that should take about 20 minutes to complete. Your workspace has the equipment necessary, but there are also extra tools, scattered around the workstation. The task should be easy, but you haven’t performed this exact task in the past few months. A good portion of this 20 minutes could be spent just trying to figure out what you need, and what might be missing. A clearly labeled workspace and tool outline in your area would immediately cut down on preparation time and the possibility of rework needed due to the use of an incorrect tool. In the video below, Reggie Niesler shows how the labelling of the tool bin helps to “give everything a home” ...

• Saving Minutes with SMED

  When Mr. Ritsuo Shingo - whose father developed the process of SMED (Single Minutes Exchange of Die; a literal translation) - visited Cambridge last week, we were treated to an overview of how the process was implemented to be part of the famed Toyota Production System. To watch a brief summary of his presentation to Cambridge employees and Lean tour guests, click here. The operational engineers at Cambridge, having been familiar with SMED through their Lean training, found the first two opportunities to perform our own SMED events in the M-Series and S-Series lines.   First, the facts. Our S-Series testing process was clocking in at 2 hours and 13 minutes from start to finish. To be able to review the whole process, we set up a tripod equipped with an iPhone to record the tester and equipment as they would naturally unfold. Then, a group of engineers, team leads and testers watched the footage to identify areas of improvement, leading to some easily obtainable adjustments such as moving one test to another line and using battery powered tools rather than hand tools for ...