Lean Manufacturing Archives | Page 18 of 24

You Can’t Steal What is Shared Freely

By Jon Miller - April 22nd, 2008

Whoever got people started using the phrase “steal shamelessly” in regards to lean ideas and practices should be ashamed. I am quietly offended when people say this to me because it shows a certain lack of respect for the a

Built-In Quality Means Having Your Cake But Not Eating It

By Jon Miller - April 20th, 2008

There was an interesting bit of news from the BBC about a Honda factory in Swindon, England. Apparently the management there have placed restrictions on the sorts of cakes, fruit and chocolates the workers can eat in their break rooms.

A Lean Enterprise Transformation is Like a Marathon

By Jon Miller - April 13th, 2008

A lean enterprise transformation is like a marathon. Success depends on daily conditioning. It’s unlike a marathon in that it’s not a race with a goal at the end of 26 miles. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say being a

How Many Times Do You Pull the Andon Cord Each Day?

By Jon Miller - April 8th, 2008

A reader commented recently on the article about the ten reasons one piece flow will not work saying “The answer to one and two is “watch production stop!?” If this is your plan to make/save money and work as a team,

Fixed Position Stop System

By Jon Miller - March 12th, 2008

Brandon posted a question in the comment section of an article about hourly production control boards, asking: “I have an automotive assembly line and it contains six different stations. The vehicles are on a automated line that

Three Essential Supervisor Skills for Standard Work

By Jon Miller - February 27th, 2008

Standard work (called standardized work at Toyota) is hard but it’s so important. As one of the cornerstones of the lean system, the difference between having standard work and not having it is truly a step difference in an organ

Is Lean a Superstition?

By Jon Miller - February 18th, 2008

The Training Within Industry blog took up the debate on “Is lean a religion?” a few weeks ago. The article points out that when done right, lean is more of a philosophy that guides how you do thing and how you lead people.

What Can We Learn from Boeing’s Lean Supply Chain Stumbles?

By Jon Miller - January 23rd, 2008

Not much more than a decade ago, Boeing went through a hiring binge to ramp up production, fell flat on deliveries and shed many jobs as a result. Gemba’s office is quite near Boeing’s Everett, Washington factory and the fu

Tap Your Breaks Early and Often to Keep Work Flowing

By Jon Miller - December 20th, 2007

Here’s another counterintuitive truth to Lean: the more often you stop, the more smoothly things will move along. The caveat is that these stops should be small stops, as early and as far away from the actual problem point as pos

Five Questions to Ask When You Hear "We're too busy for Lean"

By Jon Miller - November 26th, 2007

How many times have you heard “We’re too busy for Lean” from managers and professionals in your organization? How do you respond? How do you know whether they are in fact too busy? When it is true, what do you do to g

Jim Womack Interview in IndustryWeek – Nation Full fo Kaizen Consultants

By Jon Miller - November 21st, 2007

There is a very long and insightful interview with Jim Womack available at the IndustryWeek online magazine titled Thought Leaders — Lean On Me. At over 7,000 words the discussion ranges from a history Womack and Jones’ dis

Alignment of People, Process and Purpose

By Jon Miller - October 24th, 2007

A few years ago during a visit to the gemba of high volume manufacturing client, I found a good case study in a disjointed Lean implementation. There was a lack of alignment between how management was leading the Lean effort (providing

Highlights from Lean Manufacturing Journey to the West

By Jon Miller - October 13th, 2007

On this trip to China I found a lot of openness to learning about new things, and Lean manufacturing in particular. People in China are certainly proud of their 4,000 years of history, but they are eager to learn and progress. We could

Guidelines for Continuous Moving Lines

By Jon Miller - October 11th, 2007

This article is in response to a question posted by a reader about guidelines for continuous moving lines as part of a Lean manufacturing implementation. This is not a comprehensive list of all things to consider when designing and man

Questions About Lean Manufacturing in China

By Jon Miller - October 7th, 2007

I will be in China this week seeing some factories and talking to people about Lean manufacturing. Adapting and applying time-tested methods and approaches to new environments and new challenges is always a treat. I go with many questi

Prioritizing the Elimination of the 7 Types of Waste

By Jon Miller - October 3rd, 2007

Tim Wood helps us remember the 7 types of waste, but he does not teach us about prioritizing the elimination of the 7 types of waste. “TIM WOOD” stands for Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-pr

Gary Convis on the Role of Management in Lean Manufacturing

By Jon Miller - September 23rd, 2007

Gary Convis is the Chairman of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky and also serves in Officer roles for Toyota’s North American holding companies. Gary Convis helped start up NUMMI, and he was the first American President of a ve

We Live in a Pull Universe

By Jon Miller - September 21st, 2007

Lean manufacturing works, and this has been proven through decades of practice. Yet decades are admittedly not much when measured against geologic time. Some aspects of TPS such building in quality, getting ideas from people who actual

This Too is a Kanban

By Jon Miller - September 20th, 2007

The orthodox description of a kanban is a rectangular card in a plastic sleeve used to reorder materials from a supplier or an upstream process, or a triangular metal plate used to signal production for a process that requires changeov

Push, Pull, Paper Clips & Problem Solving

By Jon Miller - September 18th, 2007

The Toyota Production System, or what we call sometimes call Lean management, is simply the practice of planning, trying out your plan, reflecting (hansei) on what worked and what did not work and making adjustments through problem sol

Keep Your Kanban Cards Close to Your Genbutsu

By Jon Miller - September 17th, 2007

The primary function of a kanban card is to provide information about production instructions. Kanban cards contain information about where to produce and transport a particular product, when and in what quantity. For information to be

The Push vs. Pull Diversion Diversion

By Jon Miller - September 16th, 2007

I’m still scratching my head over an IndustryWeek article titled The Great Push vs. Pull Diversion by By Edward S. Pound and Mark L. Spearman of Factory Physics, consultants and writers of one of my favorite Lean books. They stat

Hope for Chrysler

By Jon Miller - September 9th, 2007

My hope for Chrysler is that Jim Press can act as a consensus builder and not a heroic, problem solving executive. What Chrysler doesn’t need is a wave of Toyota Production System implementation in their factories or a dose of To

Is Your Lean Deployment “Made to Stick?”

By Jon Miller - August 21st, 2007

Mark Rosenthal is The Lean Thinker who connects the ideas from the book Made to Stick to visual controls used on the shop floor in a Lean factory. Mark argues convincingly for having “Sticky” Visual Controls in an article posted ye

Is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) a Theory?

By Jon Miller - August 18th, 2007

The tagline Theory of Constraints Exposed in an IndustryWeek article from March of this year got me thinking about TOC. Not a bad article by the way, although I’m still waiting for the Lean-TOC software system sales pitch shoe to

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