Lean Manufacturing Archives | Page 22 of 24

TPS from the Horse’s Mouth: View the Videos & Take the Quiz!

By Jon Miller - March 30th, 2006

Toyota has recently updated its website area for explaining the Toyota Production System (TPS), which includes the thinking and origins behind TPS, such as kanban, just in time, and judoka. The website offers simple explanations using

You’ve Gotta Go to Gemba More Often Than That!

By Jon Miller - March 28th, 2006

True story. Not too long ago I was with another one of our consultants teaching Just in Time principles to a group of newly minted Lean facilitators at one of our client’s factories. During one of the breaks one of the engineers

The Problem of Excessive Executive Compensation for Lean Manufacturing

By Jon Miller - March 20th, 2006

A Wall Street Journal article today titled Snow Defends Presidents’ Handling of the Economy got me thinking again about the problem of excessive executive compensation for Lean manufacturing. The problem of excessive executive compen

For Built-In Quality, Simple Is Best

By Jon Miller - March 7th, 2006

As part of our Lean manufacturing benchmarking trip we visited a bus manufacturing plant in Japan with a group of aerospace executives on February 27, 2006. We spent 6 hours observing their Lean manufacturing operation in action. We as

How Exactly Does Toyota Put People on the Balance Sheet as Assets?

By Jon Miller - March 2nd, 2006

Toyota executives are heard to say that “we put people on the balance sheet as assets” but I had taken this figuratively not literally (philosophy rather than accounting practice). At the moment I have no concrete evidence

Put People on the Balance Sheet

By Jon Miller - February 28th, 2006

According to a Trackback at the end of Bill Waddell’s latest inspiring post full of big ideas, there are only 27 hits on Google for the phrase Put People on the Balance Sheet. We’ll I’m adding #28. Thanks to the Flyin

Work Hard, Complain, and Do Kaizen

By Jon Miller - February 23rd, 2006

The Director of Human Resources for one of our clients had an “ah-ha” moment about her role in supporting Lean manufacturing and how to combine kaizen with respect for people. After we benchmarked a company effectively involving ev

Minding the Length of a Toy Duck’s Neck

By Jon Miller - January 28th, 2006

On the front page of the January 27, 2006 Wall Street Journal there was an article titled In Tot TV Shows, Money is in the Toys. I’m always delighted to find lessons about Lean manufacturing in unexpected places. The article told

We Don’t Need a Big Culture Change at Ford. No Wait, Yes We Do!

By Jon Miller - January 23rd, 2006

The Ford Motor Company presented their restructuring plan called “The Way Forward” today. Ford is planning to shake things up. In CEO Bill Ford, Jr’s words: “Here is what we will not stand for: incremental chang

The “Lean Manufacturing Push” at Chrysler

By Jon Miller - January 22nd, 2006

Selling Lean manufacturing to the world isn’t easy with headlines like Chrysler Cuts Trade Workers: In Lean Manufacturing Push, Automaker Also is Reducing Number of Job Classifications at Plants. Chrysler must be getting public r

How to Give Lean Manufacturing a Bad Name

By Jon Miller - January 18th, 2006

One way that is almost guaranteed to stop a Lean manufacturing effort in its tracks is for management to announce that Lean manufacturing will be used to eliminate jobs. It’s hard to believe that anyone still does this, but the p

Pandemic Preparation: Just in Time or Just in Case?

By Jon Miller - January 16th, 2006

In a January 12, 2006 Wall Street Journal article (also on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette) titled Just-in-Time Inventories Make U.S. Vulnerable in a Pandemic raises a question that is very common to organizations first starting out imple

Run Faster, Team

By Jon Miller - November 28th, 2005

There’s a great day-after-Thanksgiving Day piece on Joe Ely’s Learning About Lean blog. I missed the sports action over the weekend but Joe caught an American football coach’s half-time strategy for doing better in th

The Perils of Not Going “Genchi, Gembutsu” (On Site, With the Actual Things)

By Jon Miller - November 21st, 2005

I take a lot of people from many companies to Japan to see lean organizations, such as the Toyota Motor Corporation. One of the themes you see and hear in Toyota is the idea of Genchi (actual place) and Gembutsu (actual things). Toyota

Time for an Ohno Prize?

By Jon Miller - November 18th, 2005

Bill Waddell asks readers to help him out in answering the question “Why should anyone apply for the Shingo Prize?” in a recent blog entry. Bill points out that now bankrupt Delphi spent around $300,000 to win Shingo Prizes

Recommended Book: China, Inc. by Ted Fishman

By Jon Miller - November 7th, 2005

I had some trans-Pacific airplane time recently so I read China, Inc. by Ted C. Fishman. It’s not without flaws but it gives good context and perspective about China to much of the news and views you hear on China in the media to

Kaizen Mindset at the Head of Chrysler

By Jon Miller - October 24th, 2005

The October 24, 2005 Wall Street Journal article At Chrysler, Profits Don’t Keep Chief From Cutting Costs has a funny title. Why would profit keep you from cutting costs? Not everyone thinks like Taiichi Ohno, who gave chapter 14

Highlights from an Interview with Masaaki Imai

By Jon Miller - October 21st, 2005

I came across a January 28, 2005 interview with Masaaki Imai by Gita Piramal, Managing Editor of The Smart Manager, a bi-monthly Indian business management magazine. It is titled The father of Kaizen speaks! and some good questions are

No Pushing

By Jon Miller - October 20th, 2005

It always horrified me to see perfectly good products being sold at a discount because they were no longer in season or in style. Why fill a dealer lot full of cars, only to sell last year’s models at a discount? Why design and p

First, it’s about People. Second…

By Jon Miller - October 13th, 2005

There’s a very good article about Lean manufacturing implementation in a sewing shop titled Becoming a Lean Manufacturer on Kathleen Fasanella’s Fashion-Incubator blog. We don’t do much Lean manufacturing consulting i

Robots, Rabbits and Kaizen

By Jon Miller - October 10th, 2005

There was an interesting article in eWeek titled Little Things Mean a Lot. Kaizen has gone mainstream when an IT magazine uses it to make the connection between the robotic vehicle winning the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 desert race, bu

What I Learned from a Marxist about Lean Manufacturing

By Jon Miller - October 5th, 2005

While on a recent business trip to New York City I met with an old friend of mine who does human rights work. He told me a story of how he persuaded policy makers to take a position on issues of human rights by issuing statements that

Sitting Work vs. Standing Work in a Lean Manufacturing Workplace

By Jon Miller - September 27th, 2005

I recently spent 3 days standing on the shop floor while leading a training event for future kaizen facilitators. I spent probably 8.5 hours per day standing, 60 minutes sitting (lunch, breaks), and 30 minutes walking around the 100 sq

Strong Supervision: The Key to Long-term Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 27th, 2005

A few weeks ago I had lunch with Tom Berghan, Lean Manager at Genie Industries. He is an avid student of the Toyota Production System and is always good for practical insights into ground-level Lean implementation. Tom observed that as

What You Can Learn in Traffic about Lean Manufacturing

By Jon Miller - July 2nd, 2005

As a resident of the Puget Sound area of Washington State, the subject of traffic flow is one of high interest to me. Traffic around the Seattle consistently ranks in the worst five in the United States. So a July 1, 2005 Wall Street J

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