Lean Manufacturing Archives | Page 51 of 54

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

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