September 2008 | Gemba Academy

Use Only Reliable, Thoroughly Tested Means

By Jon Miller - September 30th, 2008

Principle number 8 of the Toyota Way, as defined in Jeffrey Liker’s book of the same name states: Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes. Software code is mostly reliable once it is

Get Out of Here with that Stop Watch!

By Jon Miller - September 29th, 2008

Mike Wroblewski brought back more than a kimono from his benchmarking trip to Japan. His souvenir was of far greater value. In Japanese it is called the spirit of wa, or harmony. There is a great real life story on Mike’s Got Boo

Free Takt Time Video and Calculator

By Ron Pereira - September 28th, 2008

In this video, I demonstrate how to use this free Takt Time Calculator. Feel free to download the calculator and use it however you see fit. And if you’d like to learn more about what takt time is be sure to check out our Tra

The "3 Mu" of Lean Design

By Jon Miller - September 27th, 2008

Elimination of the “3 mu” is at the heart of kaizen and lean management. The three Japanese words are muri, mura and muda. The latter is most commonly known as waste and categorized in the 7 types of overproduction, invento

Taking Changeover Time into Account for Takt Time Calculation

By Jon Miller - September 25th, 2008

How do you calculate takt time when there are regular changeover times within the production process? There are several ways to answer this question. 1. Take changeover time out of net available time. Let’s say we have a food pac

Kaizen – American Airlines Style

By Ron Pereira - September 22nd, 2008

Since I live in the DFW area and travel a lot… I’ve gotten pretty familiar with American Airlines. I should eclipse the magical “Executive Platinum” status within the next month – something that makes me feel sort of sad if y

Actual Takt Time is Planned Takt Time, Actually

By Jon Miller - September 21st, 2008

This week I am in the land of takt time: Germany. A banner on a railroad underpass for a local news program advertised “news at 60 minute takt.” An 80-year old black-and-white photograph at a local museum had a caption of w

The Seven Grand Challenges for Supply and Spend Management in the Next 25 Years

By Jon Miller - September 17th, 2008

Our friends at Sourcing Innovation are running a cross-blogging series on the Seven Grand Challenges for Supply & Spend Management (thus the grand title above), and below is my contribution. What will be the seven grand challenges

The Right Way to Calculate Optimal Crew Size

By Ron Pereira - September 17th, 2008

Here’s the situation… the cycle time to produce one unit in our widget making factory is 300 seconds and the takt time for this product is 50 seconds per piece. In other words, in order to satisfy customer demand we need to produce

Real Life SMED

By Ron Pereira - September 15th, 2008

One of the best ways I’ve found to explain various lean and six sigma topics to others is to use examples from real life. After all, not everyone makes cars or the mirrors that go on cars… so many of the examples we read about in t

Month: September 2008