Lean Fav Archives | Page 3 of 4

One Piece Flow versus Mass Production

By Ron Pereira - February 18th, 2008

Update on Nov 6, 2020: The original version of the video is no longer available. But I did want to add a note that the reaction to this original article was one of the main reasons Gemba Academy exists today. I have left the original c

Value Stream Mapping Overview

By Ron Pereira - February 8th, 2008

One of, if not the single most powerful lean tool available to us is value stream mapping (VSM). The reason it’s so powerful is because of its relevancy. You see, it doesn’t matter if you are an accountant who sits behind a

OEE – Not Just for TPM Programs!

By Ron Pereira - December 20th, 2007

If someone were to force me into a corner and only allow me to use one metric in my plant I would have to choose Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). The reason I would pick it is simple… it is really 3 metrics in one! Here is a qu

Two Types of Kaizen

By Ron Pereira - October 28th, 2007

The word kaizen is fast becoming a buzz word galore. You will hear about how people are “doing kaizen” or running a big “kaizen event” next week. Many times folks are in fact executing kaizen’s in an att

Why Flow Counter Clockwise?

By Ron Pereira - September 30th, 2007

When designing a u-shaped cell it is often recommened that material flow in a counter clockwise direction. Why is this? It’s about the right hand Research shows that most people are right handed. I have heard that as many as 85%

Transportation Muda

By Ron Pereira - August 4th, 2007

We spent the last few weeks in Canada visiting family. We had an awesome trip. As we were driving from Texas (yes driving with 3 kids more than 2400 miles) I had my eyes peeled for some good lean or six sigma topics. While drivin

Kaizen Rules – 9 & 10

By Ron Pereira - July 26th, 2007

This week has been about all things kaizen. I have to come clean and admit I wrote this entire series last weekend as I was preparing to take off on vacation with my family. Thanks to the greatness of WordPress I was able to delay the

Why Heijunka – Part 1

By Ron Pereira - June 6th, 2007

B.D. asked, “You’re talking about HOW to do heijunka, but I’m not seeing WHY.” Great comment B.D. I will attempt to answer the why here this evening. Let’s dig into the manufacturing side of things in this articl

Is Laying People off Really Anti-Lean?

By Ron Pereira - June 2nd, 2007

Update: June 3 @ 7:33 PM CST Over the weekend, this post has had some good action (via comments and emails I have received). I am modifying the original post ever so slightly to make the “assumptions” a bit more clear.

Tsurube System

By Ron Pereira - May 29th, 2007

After reading some Lean textbooks and possibly attending a conference or two many “Lean Dreams” are crushed when the practitioner is told, “Friend, there ain’t no way we are converting that $4 million paint line into some fancy

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