Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

Q&A with Mark Graban, Author of Lean Hospitals

By Jon Miller - October 3rd, 2008

Whenever we can use kaizen to improve not only our economy but the other pillars of a whole society such as education or healthcare, we are truly blessed. Next week we will be learning a lot about how hospitals are applying lean manage

Jeffrety Gitomer Tears a Few Pages from Toyota's Playbook

By Jon Miller - October 2nd, 2008

Today I want to share with you something that came in the weekly e-mail from sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer. I don’t love sales nearly enough to put into practice everything Mr. Gitomer has to teach, but his passion and insights are

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

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

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 PIT Factor in Change Management

By Jon Miller - September 14th, 2008

Forwarded from our mail server to my e-mail inbox tonight was a quote from science fiction author Frank Herbert: “The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.” It se

Do You Want to Go Far or Go Fast on Your Lean Journey?

By Jon Miller - September 12th, 2008

There is a proverb from the continent of Africa, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.” I was reminded of it this week. Companies eager to implement lean manufacturing quickly will put th

5 Things I am Still Learning about Lean Manufacturing

By Jon Miller - September 9th, 2008

Fifteen years to the week since stepping into the stormy presence of Nakao sensei, one of Taiichi Ohno’s students who know goes by the curiously alcoholic moniker of FOM – Father of Moonshine – I am still learning abo

How to Measure Knowledge Worker Productivity, Part 3

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2008

How do we measure the productivity of knowledge workers? One can feel the creative juices ebbing away just thinking about this question. So we’ll skip Part 2 and go directly to Part 3. Why not measure knowledge worker productivit

Lean Manufacturing in One Word

By Jon Miller - September 4th, 2008

Some of the most popular so-called lean manufacturing tools (some of which are actually systems, others which are disciplines, yet others which are in fact policies) can be reduced to one word: respect. This is staggering when you thin

The 7 Creativity Tools for When You are Stuck

By Jon Miller - September 2nd, 2008

There is a lot written about creativity. What is it? How can we develop it? Can it be measured and managed? An increasing amount of discussion in the business community is directed towards the topic of creativity. Many a blogger or spe

Questions Raised by Voluntary Kaizen Policy at Toyota

By Jon Miller - August 31st, 2008

Doing some more research into the “voluntary” overtime issue as a management practice in Japan, we found that American fast food giant McDonald’s was recently hit with the same ruling as Toyota and must now pay their

How to Measure Knowledge Worker Productivity, Part 1

By Jon Miller - August 26th, 2008

A little while ago I heard the comment, “If I could figure that out I would be a millionaire,” in regard o the question, “How to measure knowledge worker productivity?” This doesn’t seem like such a challe

Small Teams Enable Kaizen and TPS

By Jon Miller - August 24th, 2008

Earlier this month Pete Abilla wrote about effective team sizes in his newly redesigned Shmula blog. The idea is that generally small teams are more effective because communication is essential to team success and beyond a certain size

Reading Henry Ford's My Life and Work

By Jon Miller - August 23rd, 2008

Finding my trip to Europe extended by almost a week, my stock of reading materials reduced to less than a day’s supply, a moment for panic. But thanks to the Project Gutenberg online book catalog making My Life and Work by Henry

5 Seemingly Innocent Questions You Never Want to Hear in a Lean Deployment

By Jon Miller - August 20th, 2008

These are 5 seemingly innocent questions which in fact you never want to hear in a lean deployment. If you do hear them this does not mean your efforts are doomed, only that the thinking behind what is lean and why we are doing it may

Toyota’s Mom & Pop Suppliers Feel CCC21 Squeeze

By Jon Miller - August 14th, 2008

Just on the heels of praising Toyota’s supply chain strategy while chiding Boeing’s I came across some articles from earlier this year that give quite a different picture of being a Toyota supplier. “Best in the World

The Wedge is the Simplest of Tools

By Jon Miller - August 12th, 2008

The wedge is the simplest of tools. A wedge has a flat end and a pointy end. A wedge converts a blunt, general force into a sharp, narrowly focused force. A wedge is very effective at separating things, breaking things apart or dividin

The Hard Sell for Cells

By Jon Miller - August 10th, 2008

On a few occasions lately I’ve had to make the hard sell for cells. Typically when teaching people how to implement TPS we show more than tell. The learning by doing helps people take ownership of the decision to make a significa

Oh Noes! Boeing Haz Supply Chain Woes?

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2008

Laughter is good for us, even though sometimes we laugh because of pathos more than humor. So it is with news that Lack of Seats, Galleys Delays Boeing, Airbus from today’s Wall Street Journal. Airbus and Boeing Co. have both str

Learning from Things that Didn’t Work

By Jon Miller - August 5th, 2008

One of the common objections we hear to doing kaizen is that “We’ve tried it before and it didn’t work,” as if past failures were ever a reason for not trying again. Experience is a good teacher only if we step

Toyota’s Top Engineer on How to Develop Thinking People

By Jon Miller - August 4th, 2008

The August 4, 2008 Nikkei Business Online article titled Top Engineer Explains How Toyota Develops People (技術最高職が語る「トヨタはこう人を育てる」). The article is an interview with Nanpachi Hayashi, Toyota̵

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