Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

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.

1485 Articles

Making Standard Work Stick

By Jon Miller - September 18th, 2004

During a recent sales presentation to a prospective client, the issue of Standardization came up. This company has multiple factories around the globe and is struggling with a lack of harmonization between them. The Challenge of Standa

Product Development Performance Metrics

By Jon Miller - September 9th, 2004

During our Japan Kaikaku Experience trip in August, we visited Omron, a manufacturer of sensors and factory automation products. They have made great strides in implementing TPS, resulting in a very Lean factory. As part of their Lean

Lean and Green

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2004

One of the most enlightening moments in my personal journey was when I discovered the innovative approaches employed by top Lean companies in Japan to curb waste via efficient environmental management and energy conservation. We visite

Takt Time for Executives

By Jon Miller - August 19th, 2004

We recently had the opportunity to host 15 top executives from a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company for 3 days of Lean training, benchmarking tours, and strategizing. During this process, we gained insight into Takt Time. These

Extreme Programming & the Lean Office

By Jon Miller - August 3rd, 2004

Extreme Programming is an approach to software programming that puts two or more people in a team to work on one piece of code, at the same time, on the same computer. It might seem counterproductive to have two sets of hands and brain

Throughput, Bottlenecks, and Capacity: It’s All in the TPCBP

By Jon Miller - July 30th, 2004

One of the most under-appreciated items in the Lean tool bag is the Table of Production Capacity by Process (TPCBP, also known as Process Capacity Table). This one-pager can define the theoretical maximum output of any process by takin

Lean Fundamental: Do Today’s Work Today

By Jon Miller - July 28th, 2004

Working with clients struggling with non-Lean scheduling methods reminded me of the fundamental Lean principle of “Do today’s work today.” This principle involves avoiding late deliveries, matching capacity to demand,

Sustaining Results in the Lean Office

By Jon Miller - July 27th, 2004

At a Lean Office seminar, attendees raised the question of how to maintain office kaizen results. As with any type of kaizen, several factors need to be in place to ensure that the results achieved during an intensive week of improveme

Lean Customer Service

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2004

According to an often-cited statistic from Harvard Business Review: “Developing a new client relationship costs between six to eight times more than maintaining an existing relationship”. Spending six times more on customer

Questions from the Field #3: Lean Engineering

By Jon Miller - July 21st, 2004

The manager of System and Process Improvement encountered a third challenge while encouraging her engineers to adopt Lean thinking: “When a process is very detailed, what is the best way to map the process so that it does not get

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