Kaizen Archives | Page 12 of 12

First Face of Innovation: Go to Gemba

By Jon Miller - April 10th, 2006

I’m reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO. These days innovation seems to be the trump card of executives and politicians who have grown bored with operational excellence. So I picked up this

College Dean Concludes: Kaizen Best Learned by Doing

By Jon Miller - March 13th, 2006

E. Alan Hartman, Dean of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh College of Business, has been rolling up his sleeves and doing gemba kaizen. He first wrote about his experience with kaizen at the Ariens Co. in the Appleton Post-Crescent i

Better Safety and Ergonomics through Kaizen

By Jon Miller - February 22nd, 2006

How does kaizen improve safety and ergonomics? A February 21, 2006 article in Occupational Hazards titled Using Kaizen to Improve Safety and Ergonomics gives a good illustration. Citing a need for speedy resolution of safety issues and

Pit Crew Kaizen

By Jon Miller - January 9th, 2006

One of the aims of a Lean business model based on the Toyota Production System is to deliver products and services just in time, or exactly what the customer needs, when the customers needs it and in the exact amount they need. Product

Dueling Views on Role of Kaizen Events for Lean Transformation

By Jon Miller - December 18th, 2005

Dueling views on the role of kaizen events in a Lean transformation were expressed in the latest SME Lean newsletter. George Koenigsaecker makes an attempt at answering the question Why aren’t there more lean successes? I just fi

The Cheerful Delusion of the Kaizen Mind

By Jon Miller - December 16th, 2005

The December 16, 2005 USA Today article titled Optimism Puts Rose-colored Tint in Glasses of Top Execs is an interesting study on strength and weakness of top executives, particularly their sometimes delusional optimism. The main point

Developing Team Leaders through Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 1st, 2005

Many companies ask some variation of the question. “Why aren’t we seeing bottom line results after the kaizen event improvements?” There is more than one answer, but I recently came across a good illustration of one t

Notes from the Field: Implementation and Continuity Safety Nets

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2005

Change is hard. What a cliche. But it has achieved its high rank in the pantheon of “cliche-dom” because its underlying reality is so very common. A fact multiplied many-fold during virtually any serious kaizen event. Cold

Kaizen Teams & the Wisdom of Crowds

By Jon Miller - July 7th, 2005

Every now and then a very intelligent manager or engineer will question the whole approach of putting a kaizen team together to spend 3 to 5 days working on a problem when the solution is ‘obvious’ to this very smart person

Book Review: One Small Step Can Change Your Life – The Kaizen Way

By Jon Miller - May 8th, 2005

This is an excellent book for anyone willing to try a new approach to making an improvement in your life. It is a 180 page book with small pages, an easy read for a weekend or an airplane ride. The combination of ideas based in science

Motivating Smart People to Learn about Lean

By Jon Miller - April 13th, 2005

Sometimes I’m forced to wonder why smart people fight good ideas. Sometimes I find answers. This was true recently when an engineer at one of our clients who was also the project manager for a factory layout redesign stubbornly r

The Four Elements for Sustaining Kaizen

By Jon Miller - February 19th, 2005

One of the most frequent questions we encounter form our customers and prospects is the issue of how to sustain the gains made through kaizen and other continuous improvement efforts. In a recent discussion among our consultants, we ca

Ownership Generates Success

By Jon Miller - November 12th, 2004

Bear McLaughlin, Operations Consultant October, 2004 During my journeys of training Office and Manufacturing Lean tools and techniques, I致e come across the same key in any business environment, OWNERSHIP, no ownership, means no succe

Why Kaizen Teams Should Be Cross-Functional

By Jon Miller - October 1st, 2004

The rule of thumb to have a good mix of kaizen team members from different areas is: 1/3rd of the people from the area or process targeted for kaizen, 1/3rd of the people from upstream or downstream processes (customers and suppliers)

Kaizen Events Build Buy-in

By Jon Miller - July 13th, 2004

During a dinner meeting, I had the chance to exchange views on the progress of the Lean effort at a client company with the President. They are early in the process, having trained all employees and having done two kaizens, and are on

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