Lean Manufacturing

Gemba’s Consulting Work Featured on NIST Website

Avatar photo By Jon Miller Published on January 18th, 2006

Gemba’s consulting work at Blue Diamond Manufacturing, a division of DeLaval, has been featured at the national website of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).
Here’s a quote by Ken Johnson, the General Manager who had championed the Lean Manufacturing effort at Blue Diamond: “The real measurement of success here lies not in the great implementation of Lean Manufacturing to date, but to the real end result of the effort. Due to the changes we’ve made, DeLaval Blue Diamond Manufacturing has now positioned itself for success in the Asian market.”
This project was a good example of how an MEP (in this case Washington Manufacturing Services) found some state grant money (JSP – Job Skills Program) to fund Lean manufacturing training from consultants (Gemba) that a small company would otherwise be unable to afford.
The purpose of JSP training is to keep local jobs through training to improve productivity, or at the very least to make the workers more employable due to the training they received. This should be one of the goals of every Lean training or implementation.

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Jon Miller

Jon has dedicated his 25+ year career to the field of kaizen, continuous improvement, and lean management. Jon spent the first eighteen years of his life in Japan, then graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s in linguistics.

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