Ron Pereira, Author at Gemba Academy | Page 28 of 31

Ron Pereira

Ron Pereira is a co-founder and the Managing Director of Gemba Academy and has more than 30 years of experience helping organizations improve performance through Lean, Six Sigma, and continuous improvement. Prior to starting Gemba Academy, Ron served in a variety of manufacturing, supply chain, and leadership roles, including process engineer, engineering manager, Master Black Belt, and director of manufacturing and continuous improvement. Today, Ron works with leaders around the world to develop problem-solving capabilities, strengthen leadership, and build cultures where continuous improvement thrives. Through his writing, podcast interviews, and educational programs, he shares practical insights that help organizations achieve lasting operational excellence.

751 Articles

The Exceptional Presenter

By Ron Pereira - April 29th, 2007

Hello from 28,000 feet up in the air. I am flying back home after an awesome week of training a room full of Six Sigma students. I got to the airport a little early and ended up staring down a book shelf in one of the excessively expen

Bad Management

By Ron Pereira - April 27th, 2007

After submitting my post last night I wondered if my overly optimistic attitude was unrealistic. Only one person has commented on the post and this person seemed to think I was off my rocker a bit. I also got to thinking of the recent

Complainers Wear Me Out

By Ron Pereira - April 26th, 2007

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people constantly complain about how management or some authoritative body (i.e. government official, church leader, etc.) is doing them wrong. These people, you likely know a few, usually complain

Graphs 101 – By Seth Godin

By Ron Pereira - April 25th, 2007

My good friend Seth Godin, OK so he doesn’t know I exist but I digress, recently took note of his Google History data. He said the data shows he does a lot more searching on Tuesday. He went on to say that this was completely coi

Narrowing the list with n/3

By Ron Pereira - April 25th, 2007

Rob over at 63 Buckets recently had an excellent post where he discussed the nominal group technique. This brought to mind a neat trick that can be used to help a team take a large list of ideas and scope them down into a more manageab

Neural Linguistic Programming

By Ron Pereira - April 24th, 2007

An interesting field of study I have briefly researched (i.e. read a few books but no formal training) is Neural Linguistics Programming (NLP). I am by no means an expert in NLP and am not promoting it here. There are parts of NLP th

Lean Landscaping

By Ron Pereira - April 23rd, 2007

Some people say mixing Lean and Six Sigma with your home life is wrong. I couldn’t disagree more. I mean come on… are we supposed to just stop trying to make things better after leaving the plant? That makes no sense to me a

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By Ron Pereira - April 22nd, 2007

My wife and I have been blessed with 3 kid’s ages 4, 2, and 8 months. One of things we have always done is read to them – a lot. We read to them before bed and many times before naps. Today, before naps my 4 year old asked me

Binary Logistic Regression

By Ron Pereira - April 21st, 2007

Yikes… this title sounds serious, eh? No worries… we can get though it. We use linear regression when we have variable Y data (output) and variable X data (input) and we want to know if there is correlation between them. We

TOC Bottleneck versus Lean Pacemaker – Part 2

By Ron Pereira - April 19th, 2007

Last night we discussed the main tenets of TOC. Tonight we will introduce the Lean Pacemaker showing how it may not always be the constraint in our system. This, my friends, is where the TOC and Lean proponents often “bow up̶

TOC Bottleneck versus Lean Pacemaker – Part 1

By Ron Pereira - April 18th, 2007

Tonight I am starting a 2 part series contrasting the Theory of Constraints with Lean Manufacturing. Specifically, I want to discuss the differences between a TOC “bottleneck” and a Lean Manufacturing “pacemaker.” I have seen T

Taguchi Index – Cpm

By Ron Pereira - April 16th, 2007

Last night we discussed the Taguchi Loss Function and how Taguchi methods are more concerned with hitting the target compared to more traditional methods that often focus on keeping our data between the upper and lower specification li

Taguchi Loss Function

By Ron Pereira - April 15th, 2007

Saying the words “Genichi Taguchi” to a hard core “western statistician” may get you some dirty looks. Actually, some of these crazy statisticians may want to strike you for saying this person’s name. Why the hate you

Span – GE’s Variation Weapon

By Ron Pereira - April 12th, 2007

GE is arguably one of the best examples of Six Sigma excellence today. An often heard phrase is, “Motorola invented Six Sigma and GE perfected it.”A slick “variation weapon” GE has developed is called Span. I have never worked

Playing Fast – American Football and Lean

By Ron Pereira - April 11th, 2007

I am a big, OK fanatical, Ohio State University football (American football) fan. I grew up in Ohio and as my Mom says, “You can take the boy out of Ohio, but you can’t take Ohio out of the boy.” I grew up watching Ohio State pla

Sorry So Grumpy Lately

By Ron Pereira - April 10th, 2007

I did some hansei today on my drive home from work and realized I have been too grumpy lately. I jumped all over the airlines industry… then went after some software folks… and then tonight I had prepared to pummel a

Jidoka – The Forgotten Pillar

By Ron Pereira - April 9th, 2007

In the Toyota Production System house there are two pillars. The one pillar most of the books are written about is JIT. You know all the fun stuff about one piece flow and pull. But there is an entire other pillar that, in my opinion

The Airline Companies Amaze Me

By Ron Pereira - April 8th, 2007

In Lean and Six Sigma we speak about the importance of understanding value from the perspective of the customer. If you miss this all the Kanban and Control Charts in the world won’t help you. Most of the airline companies in

Happy Easter!

By Ron Pereira - April 7th, 2007

I, along with my family, wish you a safe and happy Easter. I hope you are able to enjoy some time off with friends and loved ones.

Un-Lean Lean Companies

By Ron Pereira - April 6th, 2007

I recently purchased some Value Stream Mapping software and got a kick out the experience. Here I was buying software to help me battle waste and inefficiency, right? Well I go to this company’s website and click “buy now” next t

Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED)

By Ron Pereira - April 4th, 2007

One of the core principles to making a Lean system work is Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED). You may also hear it referred to as “Quick Changeover” especially in western companies. Common Misconceptions Contrary to what some t

How to Achieve Zero Defects

By Ron Pereira - April 3rd, 2007

A few days ago my friend Jon Miller posted an interesting blog where the discussion was how to achieve zero defects. A few of my favorite bloggers, John Hunter and Pete Abilla, posted comments to Jon’s blog so I will not repeat what

Bloggers Unite in Keller Texas

By Ron Pereira - April 1st, 2007

Since starting Lean Six Sigma Academy I have been fortunate enough to form many new friends. Perhaps the most interesting friendship I have made is with one of the “giants” of the Lean blogosphere, Mark Graban. Mark and I live in t

Textron Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - March 30th, 2007

I recently came across this article written about the Six Sigma program at Textron. In the article Bob Zimering, a Textron Master Black Belt, discusses Six Sigma at Textron and responds to some of its critics. When discussing th

How Not to Screw up Pluses and Deltas

By Ron Pereira - March 29th, 2007

An extremely powerful, yet often misused, tool is pluses and deltas. I say misused since 9 out of 10 people I know (including MANY consultants) do not know how to do them properly. What are Pluses and Deltas? The easiest way to do plus

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