July 2004 | Gemba Academy

Throughput, Bottlenecks, and Capacity: It’s All in the TPCBP

By Jon Miller - July 30th, 2004

One of the most under-appreciated items in the Lean tool bag is the Table of Production Capacity by Process (TPCBP, also known as Process Capacity Table). This one-pager can define the theoretical maximum output of any process by takin

Lean Fundamental: Do Today’s Work Today

By Jon Miller - July 28th, 2004

Working with clients struggling with non-Lean scheduling methods reminded me of the fundamental Lean principle of “Do today’s work today.” This principle involves avoiding late deliveries, matching capacity to demand,

Sustaining Results in the Lean Office

By Jon Miller - July 27th, 2004

At a Lean Office seminar, attendees raised the question of how to maintain office kaizen results. As with any type of kaizen, several factors need to be in place to ensure that the results achieved during an intensive week of improveme

Lean Customer Service

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2004

According to an often-cited statistic from Harvard Business Review: “Developing a new client relationship costs between six to eight times more than maintaining an existing relationship”. Spending six times more on customer

Questions from the Field #3: Lean Engineering

By Jon Miller - July 21st, 2004

The manager of System and Process Improvement encountered a third challenge while encouraging her engineers to adopt Lean thinking: “When a process is very detailed, what is the best way to map the process so that it does not get

Questions from the Field #2: Lean Engineering

By Jon Miller - July 20th, 2004

Continuing to collaborate with the manager of System and Process Improvement, to encourage the engineers to adopt Lean thinking, she encountered a second challenge: “How do we run to a variable Takt time, and are there other ways

Questions from the Field #1: Lean Engineering

By Jon Miller - July 19th, 2004

We received several good questions from a manager of System and Process Improvement attempting to do kaizen in engineering. She noticed that there were significant areas for improvement (known as Lean opportunities) within the engineer

Quality & Law Enforcement: Detection vs. Prevention

By Jon Miller - July 15th, 2004

During a kaizen workshop, the kaizen team identified the lack of value-added content in the final inspection process. This led to an interesting comparison of quality systems that do not practice Lean manufacturing principles, with the

Kaizen Events Build Buy-in

By Jon Miller - July 13th, 2004

During a dinner meeting, I had the chance to exchange views on the progress of the Lean effort at a client company with the President. They are early in the process, having trained all employees and having done two kaizens, and are on

Kaizen is Like Climbing a Mountain: Drive Stakes in Along the Way

By Jon Miller - July 12th, 2004

The team leader of a kaizen project, we’ll call him Tim, was very disappointed in the weeks immediately after the kaizen. During his routine check-in with the machine operators, he discovered that inventory was accumulating once

Month: July 2004