Lean Manufacturing Archives | Page 23 of 24

Qingdao Haier’s Bids for Maytag: LeanSigma Goes to China?

By Jon Miller - June 23rd, 2005

Qingdao Haier, the giant Chinese appliance manufacturer along with Blackstone Group and Bain Capital has placed a bid to acquire Maytag. Their bid is $2 per share higher than the competing bid from Ripplewood Holdings. It is far from a

95% Cost Reduction: That’s Kaikaku

By Jon Miller - June 19th, 2005

According to a June 17, 2005 article in the Financial Times, Toyota plans to cut the cost of hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles by from $1,000,000 to $50,000 by 2015. That is a 95% cost reduction, in 10 years. The Lean manufacturing e

Lean & Assembly Line Throughput Times

By Jon Miller - June 18th, 2005

Who or what is telling people to look at throughput time (lead-time) through the assembly line when measuring productivity? This number is completely unrelated to assembly line productivity. I have run into the situation where people c

Making Work As Simple as Possible (but Not Simpler)

By Jon Miller - June 11th, 2005

I was reminded again this week at how easy it is to make things more complicated than necessary. This is true in so many ways. When asked “What is Lean?” by people who really want to know, it is tempting to explain the enti

Holding Up the Top Half of the Value Stream Map

By Jon Miller - June 6th, 2005

One of our clients has 3 people in their Lean department and about 1,000 people in IT. I recently met about 30 of them at a planning meeting for a new factory. They were all very nice people. To be fair there is also a group of manufac

The Forest and the Trees: a Lesson in Change

By Jon Miller - May 30th, 2005

There is a saying “Not seeing the forest for the trees” which means that you can’t see the overall situation because you are too focused on one or more of the smaller details. This is a common challenge for people try

Teaching Lean without Words

By Jon Miller - May 29th, 2005

The last few months I have been working with customers in lands where they don’t speak English as a first language. This has helped me better understand what my Japanese teachers said and did as they taught kaizen in the U.S. It

Balancing Market Leadership and Social Responsibility at Toyota

By Jon Miller - May 14th, 2005

It has been an interesting week for Toyota watchers. In response to Chairman Okuda’s call to Japanese automobile makers last week to raise prices to give GM some “breathing room”, Toyota’s operational executives

Hyundai Throws Down the Glove

By Jon Miller - April 29th, 2005

According to news reports today April 29, 2005, Hyundai Motors is predicting that they will be the top quality producer by 2008, displacing Toyota. This is good news for Toyota and their kaizen efforts. Toyota needs a worthy challenger

It is Not Enough that Toyota Succeeds, GM Must Also Not Fail

By Jon Miller - April 25th, 2005

On Monday April 25th 2005 Chairman Hiroshi Okuda of Toyota gave a speech to the Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) in which he said “we are concerned about GM and other automakers” and called on Japanese automaker

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

Build a Lean Enterprise on a Stable Foundation

By Jon Miller - March 8th, 2005

It’s interesting how things come in threes. Recently the issue of stability and how it affects successful Lean implementation came up three times in rapid succession. Following up with a client of ours who is a candy factory (ver

On-time Delivery Starts with Trust

By Jon Miller - February 27th, 2005

On a recent trip to Dallas I had the chance to reflect on two different companies facing similar issues with poor on-time deliveries. One was an aerospace company and the other a consumer electronics company. Their production processes

OEE Basics from Europe

By Jon Miller - February 22nd, 2005

by Charles Lukey What is OEE and what can it do? OEE stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Done correctly, it can show you where your machines are losing money and what you can do about it. OEE is a powerful metric, calculated fr

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

Three Keys to Sustaining 5S

By Jon Miller - February 8th, 2005

Visiting a plant tour at a Midwestern cold rolled steel mill today, I had the chance to reflect on what makes a 5S effort sustained and successful. The owner took me through the mill and showed me a line at the start of the tour that w

Where to Start the Lean Journey: 5S or With VSM?

By Jon Miller - February 1st, 2005

From time to time the question comes up, as it did again this week, or where an organization should start their Lean journey. Should they do 5S first and remove the obvious clutter? Or should they Value Stream Map the entire process, i

Why does Toyota Share the Secrets of TPS?

By Jon Miller - January 25th, 2005

During an overview of TPS given during a Just In Time training class, one of the participants asked why it was that Toyota was willing to share their secrets with their competitors. This is a question worth thinking deeply about. Certa

Planning a Lean Journey? Take the Toyota Way

By Jon Miller - January 14th, 2005

A survey of members by the Lean Enterprise Institute’s in February of 2004 found that 36% of those surveyed were in the planning or starting phase of Lean implementation. This number may be even higher if the level of requests we

TPS is the Thinking People System

By Jon Miller - December 1st, 2004

Recently, a friend who is a Lean Manager for a local aerospace company gave us some insight into how Toyota is presenting TPS to the world. After studying at several Toyota facilities in Kentucky, he informed us that they are now calli

A Sense of Urgency Like Smokey & the Bandit

By Jon Miller - November 28th, 2004

On a recent trip to Brazil, I had the opportunity to visit a 270-employee automotive components manufacturer that is doing Lean. I was very impressed by the openness to change and the energy I felt among both the management and workfor

TPM Metrics & Financial Impact

By Jon Miller - November 17th, 2004

What metrics are available when utilizing TPM to show the financial impact of your program? During a recent kaizen event, we reviewed the TPM program for one of our clients. The Operations Manager raised a good question regarding TPM m

VP of Lean Enterprise Plays 20 Questions with Lean Managers

By Jon Miller - November 15th, 2004

We received an odd call today at Gemba. Our Office Manager transferred the call to one of our senior consultants, saying “The person on the line wants to know about Heijunka.” The caller whom we’ll call Jay to protect

Keeping Minds Nimble, Bodies Limber at Toyota

By Jon Miller - November 5th, 2004

Whenever we visit Toyota in Japan there is always at least one member of our study group who makes a comment about the pace at which the assemblers at the engine line and body assembly line work. At Takt Times of around a minute, worke

In the News: Overproduction in Detroit

By Jon Miller - October 31st, 2004

On page one of the October 29th, 2004 Wall Street Journal there was an article titles “Big Dealers Pressure Car Makers To Cut Production: Higher Costs, Thinner Margins Are Forcing Major Sellers to Keep their Inventories Lean̶

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