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

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

Reader Question: Project Handoffs

By Ron Pereira - December 12th, 2007

A reader of the blog recently sent me the following question. Ron, I have a question. Here at my “office” we’ve been doing LSS for about two years now. After a successful Green/Black belt project completion we “

Are Suggestion “Boxes” the Best Way to Go?

By Ron Pereira - December 11th, 2007

A recent article by my friend Jon Miller got me thinking about suggestion boxes. For those unaware many companies ask their employees to submit improvement ideas into a box. Management then looks at the ideas and in some cases acts on

Be Like Tony – Smile More!

By Ron Pereira - December 10th, 2007

OK, I admit it. I have jumped on the Dallas Cowboy’s bandwagon. For those who don’t follow American football the Dallas Cowboys are having their best season ever. They have won 12 games and only lost 1. Their one loss was to a team

Toyota’s Suggestion System: 56 Years and Still Going Strong

By Jon Miller - December 9th, 2007

In 1951 Toyota launched its Creative Idea Suggestion System. It was largely a copy of suggestion systems that were in place in U.S. companies at the time, namely the Ford Motor Company. Toyota made some notable innovations to it over t

Lean Journey Advice from an Optimistic Hungarian Scientist

By Jon Miller - December 5th, 2007

I spent last week in Hungary on consulting assignment. Several times I heard from the locals, “We Hungarians are a pessimistic people” but they are making slow but steady progress with Lean nonetheless. I was also introduce

Continuous Improvement Begins with You!

By Ron Pereira - December 5th, 2007

One of the things that drives me batty is how hard some people make continuous improvement. Some think you have to go to 2 or 4 weeks of training to make something better. Some think if you don’t have a green or black belt you are no

No Standards No Kaizen

By Ron Pereira - December 3rd, 2007

I don’t know the exact quote and I am 38,000 feet in the air (I am flying home from London) so I can’t look it up… but Taiichi Ohno once said something like, “Without standards there can be no kaizen.” What does this mean? We

Direct Instruction, Standardized Work and Kaizen

By Jon Miller - December 2nd, 2007

I learned about something called Direct Instruction in chapter seven of Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres. This book is a light and entertaining read on statistics and evidence-based decisions in marketing, education, healthcare and governm

Sensei and Sensibility

By Jon Miller - November 29th, 2007

Please excuse the pun. I’m increasingly convinced that awareness and sensibility outweigh knowledge and capability when it comes to being a Lean leader or teacher of kaizen. Taiichi Ohno called for a “revolution of awarenes

I am Addicted to Kaizen

By Ron Pereira - November 29th, 2007

Hi, my name is Ron and I am addicted to kaizen. I was first introduced to kaizen years ago and while I did like it I didn’t go overboard. I worked on a few point kaizen events but never really accomplished more than some nice

Muri, Hubris and the Laws of Proportion

By Jon Miller - November 28th, 2007

One reason that the Toyota Production System is so effective is that it is built around many fundamental principles which apply universally. One of these pieces of timeless wisdom is that muri is bad and should be avoided. Muri is the

Five Questions to Ask When You Hear "We're too busy for Lean"

By Jon Miller - November 26th, 2007

How many times have you heard “We’re too busy for Lean” from managers and professionals in your organization? How do you respond? How do you know whether they are in fact too busy? When it is true, what do you do to g

What I Learned About TPS from Ratatouille

By Jon Miller - November 22nd, 2007

Our family watched the Disney-Pixar animated film Ratatouille last night. It is a story about an intelligent rat and a kitchen full of cooks at a haute cuisine restaurant in Paris. About half way through the film a cook named Colette i

Jim Womack Interview in IndustryWeek – Nation Full fo Kaizen Consultants

By Jon Miller - November 21st, 2007

There is a very long and insightful interview with Jim Womack available at the IndustryWeek online magazine titled Thought Leaders — Lean On Me. At over 7,000 words the discussion ranges from a history Womack and Jones’ dis

The Three Habits Required for Built-In Quality (Jidoka)

By Jon Miller - November 19th, 2007

As one of the pillars of the classic TPS house, jidoka represents two distinct but important ideas. The first part of jidoka or “automation with a human touch” involves the harmonization of people and machines. Humans shoul

Back from the Big House

By Ron Pereira - November 18th, 2007

Let me just say this past weekend rocked! As regular readers of the blog know I attended the Ohio State versus Michigan football game this past Saturday. Well my Buckeyes handled Michigan with ease and won the Big Ten championship.

Year: 2007