2007 | Gemba Academy

One Year of Blogging!

By Ron Pereira - December 30th, 2007

Close to one year ago I started this little blog with the post Lean or Six Sigma?. Truth be told I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing (and am still learning) but knew I loved to write. I also knew I loved teaching people about lean a

101 Kaizen Templates

By Jon Miller - December 26th, 2007

January 2008 will mark 10 years Gemba Research has been in business. This blog has been active for just over four years now. We are reflecting on the past 10 years in an effort to renew our purpose and focus our energies. We will do th

Tap Your Breaks Early and Often to Keep Work Flowing

By Jon Miller - December 20th, 2007

Here’s another counterintuitive truth to Lean: the more often you stop, the more smoothly things will move along. The caveat is that these stops should be small stops, as early and as far away from the actual problem point as pos

OEE – Not Just for TPM Programs!

By Ron Pereira - December 20th, 2007

If someone were to force me into a corner and only allow me to use one metric in my plant I would have to choose Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). The reason I would pick it is simple… it is really 3 metrics in one! Here is a qu

Lean Management Means Shifting from PPT to PPS

By Jon Miller - December 18th, 2007

One of the fundamental behavior changes required by organizations today in order to successfully practice lean management is to shift from communicating via PPT to communicating via PPS. By PPT we mean Microsoft PowerPoint and by PPS w

The Lion and the Gnat

By Ron Pereira - December 18th, 2007

One of my kiddos picked The Aesop for Children for their bedtime book. It is chalk full of short fables with some sort of theme associated with them. One of the fables I read called “The Lion and the Gnat” was an excel

Lean Enterprise Rules of Three

By Jon Miller - December 17th, 2007

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar.” That’s from an eu

Update on iSixSigma Magazine

By Ron Pereira - December 15th, 2007

As I’ve previously mentioned I have been asked to be part of iSixSigma Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. I was recently asked to write an article for the magazine as part of a new series called “Ask the Expert.&

The Secret Lives of Toyota Term Employees, Episode 4

By Jon Miller - December 13th, 2007

Somehow, I Will Get through This Week I have been reluctant to post Episode 4 in the Secret Lives of Toyota Term Employees because the continuing story of the Tahara plant worker Maruo is so bleak. Last week Kevin Meyer at the Evolving

Start Simple, Go Back to Basics, Repeat

By Jon Miller - December 12th, 2007

This is an image of the assembly line at Toyota’s Honsha plantin Koromo City, over 60 years ago. We may think we have come a long way from this, but in fact nearly every month I see a 21st century factory that looks not too diffe

Year: 2007