Nirmalya Kumar Quotes

The best American manufacturers customize products to meet customer needs, reduce the time required to make them and constantly improve their design.

Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.

We dried continuously day and night. We had no efficient way to do it, so we built this new popcorn plant.

For much of Toyota's history, we have ensured the quality and reliability of our vehicles by placing a device called an andon cord on every production line - and empowering any team member to halt production if there's an assembly problem. Only when the problem is resolved does the line begin to move again.

Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.

We got to this point by constantly perfecting our products.

Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.

Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.

What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.

I'm certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.

The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products.

I've been to so many manufacturing plants. I've yet to walk into one where I did not think AI solutions wouldn't help.

Generally speaking, if you control matter more precisely, you can get more efficiency out of any process.

Executives need ample flexibility to respond to the market. That means both reducing costs and increasing innovation.

I think the next massive wave of value creation will be when you can get a manufacturing company or agriculture devices company or a health care company to develop dozens of AI solutions to help their businesses.

Even a small reduction in errors and rework can have a significant impact.

I think anyone who makes products has this simultaneous joy and, almost, shame looking at it. You look at it all day, and all you can see is all these things you want to make better.

I think that every project offers an opportunity to reinvent process as well as content.

A big part of my job is to accelerate our ability to bring innovative products to our customers more quickly.

There's a lot of guys who use their likeness - to do movies, and do other business stuff, but not too many guys are actually making product. I'm making product, it's a different thing. A lot of guys are holding up Coke cans and get paid a lot of money to do that, but no one's making a Coke can. I'm the guy that's trying to make the Coke can.

I was totally humbled by how hard it is to create a product every day that needs to be made from scratch.

Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.

There's a historical view that adding process into a scrappy start-up kills innovation, but I'm a firm believer that you need process at some point to remain agile.