Lean Manufacturing Archives | Page 50 of 54

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

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

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