Downtime is the enemy of lean. Downtime is, in fact, waste. Idled lines do not add value. Restarting production after unplanned downtime requires more effort, usually expended with less efficiency and worker productivity. This reintroduces waste, which creates added costs that customers do not pay for, yet must be absorbed into cost of goods sold.

As work piles up in our in-boxes and on our desks, the question should occur-what important issues am I missing? It is an interesting fact that a high percentage of our critical work and the data we use to make decisions are still outside the operations systems we have-ERP, accounting, modeling and decision support.

Looking at the 12-month period ending with July 2012, the winery-to-consumer shipping channel has grown to $1.35bn, representing 8.6 percent of the total U.S. wine retail market, according to a report from ShipCompliant and Wines + Vines Magazine.

Manufacturing is one industry that is wasting data for lack of the means to quickly and effectively analyze it.

A glitch that sat between a Little Caesars franchisee's POS system and its payment processor, Fifth Third, caused one of its pizza shops to process zero payment card transactions for more than eight months. (A second store didn't process transactions for two months.) And then, to the non-delight of that store's customers, the glitch was fixed and they started getting collectively hit with thousands of charges for eight months of pizza purchases.

British American Tobacco has elected to standardize on Apriso's FlexNet as its exclusive manufacturing execution system software solution.

Mazda Motor Logistics Europe N.V., the Belgian-based operation of Mazda Motors, is using Descartes' cloud-based customs solution to automate declaration filings in Belgium.

In spite of several laws passed in the last decade, we have not begun to scratch the surface of addressing the cost of healthcare.

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is testing out a new checkout system that enables shoppers to avoid long lines and scan items in store aisles using their smartphones.

ERP systems are used throughout most large enterprises, with SAP and Oracle accounting for 80 percent or more of the installed based in regulated sectors such as pharma and energy. But these same systems, with their million-dollar development budgets and long learning curves, have been singularly unsuccessful in smaller enterprises.