Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

At Schneider Electric, we pride ourselves in making our customers’ buildings safer, more reliable, efficient, comfortable, and stylish. I work in the Industrial Design and Ergonomics team , which is made up of more than 25 industrial designers from the top art and design schools around the world. Our design offices are strategically located across five continents, which ensures our designers can develop a deep understanding of each regional design trends and styles, so that our solutions meet the unique needs of customers, everywhere. Our team’s success can be measured by the fact that since 2010, we have won more than 40 prestigious design awards.   The Reddot Awards Most recently, our efforts been recognized at the prestigious Reddot Awards, where we were honored to receive three design awards, each in the Reddot Winner category .  Established in 1995, and now one of the most sought-after quality marks for good design, the Reddot Design international awards competition ...

In 2008 I was the product marketing manager for a mining-industry MES package called Ampla (still going strong today). In those days, we would focus on the relationship between people, technology and management systems as the “magic” that would lead to production improvement. I also use to particularly like the work of Ralph Rio from the industry analysts ARC, his  “Intersection of Lean and MES Best Practices” is still online. Ralph pointed out that a key issue with lean manufacturing implementations was “backsliding”.  This is illustrated by his chart below… The basic idea is that while you can do a lot with just the 2 “ingredients” of people and management systems (blue line), technology provides the mechanism that continues to drive improvement over time (green line).  With no technology to lock in the gains, improvements will inevitably deteriorate over time (red line). Everyone in the production game has seen this I’m sure. I was reminded of Ralph’s elegant ch...