August 2007 | Page 2 of 5

Lean Sushi

By Ron Pereira - August 26th, 2007

I came across a fun story of how a sushi shop uses lean principles to its advantage. Kura Zushi, operated by Kura Corp., is the third-largest player in the industry. What sets it apart is its just-in-time production system, similar to

Target, Actual, Please Explain

By Jon Miller - August 24th, 2007

I learned some important lessons today. One which I will share is to never compromise when it comes to placing visual status boards on the shop floor. Visual status boards promote problem solving and kaizen by exposing problems. There

Kaizen Song: We Demand Visual Controls

By Jon Miller - August 22nd, 2007

We Demand Visual Controls (to the music of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”) A fax was on my desk, it spoke of promises “My order isn’t there, hey when was it sent?” Which came as some surprise, logged in and

Teaching with LEGO

By Ron Pereira - August 22nd, 2007

I am passionate about teaching people the principles of lean and six sigma but this passion is nothing compared to how badly I want my children to learn and grow into well rounded/successful citizens. I often joke about how I intend to

Descriptive Statistics – Part 2

By Ron Pereira - August 21st, 2007

Last night in part 1 of this series we began our discussion of descriptive statistics by introducing the three measures of central tendency – the mean, median, and mode. As promised tonight we switch gears and are all about var

Is Your Lean Deployment “Made to Stick?”

By Jon Miller - August 21st, 2007

Mark Rosenthal is The Lean Thinker who connects the ideas from the book Made to Stick to visual controls used on the shop floor in a Lean factory. Mark argues convincingly for having “Sticky” Visual Controls in an article posted ye

Descriptive Statistics – Part 1

By Ron Pereira - August 20th, 2007

Tonight we are starting a two part series on descriptive statistics. Yeah, I know, many of you are likely having nasty flash backs of some professor with bad breath but by the end of this series I hope to make all those bad thoughts

The Essence of Shop Floor Management

By Jon Miller - August 20th, 2007

Chris Schrandt is a Gemba guy from Toyota who has wealth of experience in quality management and TPS. He had several great quotes during a problem solving class today, and this one about exposing problems struck me as particularly wort

iSixSigma Editorial Advisory Board

By Ron Pereira - August 19th, 2007

I am very honored (and humbled) to announce that I have accepted an invitation to sit on the iSixSigma Magazine editorial advisory board. In this role I will have the opportunity to offer feedback and ideas to what I believe to be

Is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) a Theory?

By Jon Miller - August 18th, 2007

The tagline Theory of Constraints Exposed in an IndustryWeek article from March of this year got me thinking about TOC. Not a bad article by the way, although I’m still waiting for the Lean-TOC software system sales pitch shoe to

Month: August 2007