Ron Pereira, Author at Gemba Academy

Ron Pereira

Ron has more than 20 years of experience in various manufacturing, supply chain, and senior leadership roles. Ron has held the titles of process engineer, engineering manager, master black belt, and director of manufacturing & continuous improvement. In 2002 Ron was the first American to win the Nokia Global Six Sigma and Overall Quality award in Helsinki, Finland. Ron holds a bachelor's degree in automated manufacturing and an MBA in technology management.

759 Articles

Repent, I mean Hansei!

By Ron Pereira - May 2nd, 2007

I never seem to stop learning from my friend Jon Miller. I wanted to write a post about hansei and thus decided to dig around to see what other bloggers had to say on the topic. I typed hansei into Google and mid way through the firs

100th Post!

By Ron Pereira - May 1st, 2007

Tonight was my 100th post since starting LSS Academy in January of this year. So as I sip on some cheap Sutter Home White Zinfandel wine (California 2003) and reflect on the past few months I would just like to say thanks to all of you

Dumbing Down Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - April 30th, 2007

I recently came across an interesting article written by Mark Kiemele, co-founder and president of Air Academy Associates. In the article Mr. Kiemele discusses how Six Sigma could die a slow death or remain around for many years to com

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

Superfactory Training

By Ron Pereira - April 5th, 2007

I recently came across a news article about our friends over at the Superfactory. It seems they have recently launched some elearning and the prices are very affordable compared to some elearning I have seen from others. Upon further e

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

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