Lean Office Archives | Page 11 of 12

Lean Broadcasting? NHK Calls Toyota for Help with Kaizen

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2006

Another embattled Japanese state-owned enterprise asked Toyota executives for help with kaizen yesterday. NHK (the national broadcasting corporation) has requested that Toyota send an official to join the board of directors of NHK. Toy

Lean Food Service: Cut Overproduction, Feed the Hungry

By Jon Miller - April 13th, 2006

One of the informal definitions of Lean manufacturing is “doing more with less”. A Puget Sound Business Journal article titled Throw Out Less Food and Help the Less Fortunate made a lot of sense to me. It maps out some prac

What is Lean Government?

By Jon Miller - April 4th, 2006

As Lean manufacturing and “Lean fill-in-the-blank” take root in mainstream business consciousness I am noticing more mention of “lean government” by politicians in sound bytes as well as press releases and articles. I’m afrai

5S Your Desk: And Other Tips for Office Productivity

By Jon Miller - March 21st, 2006

“I know where everything is.” How many times have you heard (or given) this rejoinder to “please 5S your desk“? It’s hard to argue the logic of “cluttered desk, cluttered mind” when a desk is a

Herman Miller NT Furniture is NoT Lean

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2006

At Gemba we advocate something called the “open office” both for ourselves and to support the Lean transaction efforts of our clients. The open office is exactly what it sounds like, a Lean office area with as few walls as possible

Chief Quality Officer of GE: Six Sigma is Dead

By Jon Miller - January 25th, 2006

The January 30, 2006 BusinessWeek article titled Would You Recommend Us? introduces something called “net promoter” scores being used by GE Healthcare to measure customer loyalty. Simplified, it’s a metric based on ho

Lean Office “Open Room” Foils Unethical Recruiter

By Jon Miller - January 24th, 2006

At Gemba we do our best to practice what we preach. This means that we turn our Lean tools inwards on ourselves and work hard to develop a kaizen culture. One of the most visible ways we do this is through our “open office”. There

Hope for Lean at Local Government Levels

By Jon Miller - January 12th, 2006

A posting on the Evolving Excellence blog titled Putting Perfume on a Pig paints a grim picture how a panel of some of the so-called best minds brought together by the U.S. Department of Commerce think of U.S. manufacturing. Making thi

Business Process Outsourcing, Meet Value Engineering

By Jon Miller - January 2nd, 2006

There’s a good article today in The Hindu Business Line that talks about how BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) firms in India are using kaizen, six sigma, Lean transactions and value engineering to streamline its already lowest-

Lean Engineering and Taking Down the Walls

By Jon Miller - December 22nd, 2005

Earlier this week I visited a customer who is just starting out with their Lean transformation. They are an engineering firm. They have toured another one of our clients who has succeeded in implementing Lean in their transactional are

I’ll Have Some Innovation Please, but Hold the Kaizen

By Jon Miller - December 19th, 2005

Predictability can be a good thing or a bad thing. A friend of mine named John Cass is a guru in the areas of PR and corporate blogging. John pushed my buttons by pointing me at an article by Knowledge@Wharton from the Wharton School o

A3 Report Title: 189 Apologies

By Jon Miller - December 14th, 2005

We don’t manufacture automobiles, but I know a bit about how it must feel when automobile companies issue a recall and have to ask many thousands of customers to bring in their vehicles to fix a flaw they have discovered. We found ou

Lean Food Service in Korea Factory Cafeteria

By Jon Miller - December 11th, 2005

I’ve been a fan of Korean food for a long time, but now I’m also a fan of Korean kitchenware. I’ve always thought the steel chopsticks were particularly a good idea. Here’s my dinner on a washable, reusable dinner tray

The Kaizen Cops Clobber Government Waste in Kenya

By Jon Miller - December 2nd, 2005

I’ve been chuckling quielty to myself for the past couple of days over an article I read. Now that I have internet access, I’d like share it with you. The Kenya News Agency headline screams

Peter Pan, Kaizen and Joseph Lieberman

By Jon Miller - November 15th, 2005

An article in today’s New Britain Herald brightened what was otherwise a rainy, jet-lagged winter day here in the Puget Sound. Connecticut is a hotbed of Lean manufacturing and kaizen activity. Many clients of the Shingijutsu con

Genchi Gembutsu in Aceh, Indonesia

By Jon Miller - November 3rd, 2005

Indonesia was not high on the list of places I thought I would read about an example of Lean government. So I was pleasantly surprised to find an article on the front page of the November 2, 2005 Wall Street Journal titled After the Ts

How Not to Spend $453 Million

By Jon Miller - October 24th, 2005

Listening to the radio on my commute last week I heard a perfect example of the opposite of Lean government. I’m always bothered by waste but this was truly disturbing. In the highway bill signed this summer there is what is know

Postal Service Provides Model for Lean Government

By Jon Miller - September 10th, 2005

It would be easy to point out how non-Lean the U.S. government has been at city, state and federal levels these last few weeks. We’ve seen examples of lack of decision making, poor logistics, lack of alignment of goals, poor comm

Effective ERP Implementation

By Jon Miller - August 29th, 2005

I recently read about a Japanese company called OKI Electronics that went through implementing a new ERP system. They had a few good rules that I thought were quite smart and something I think all of us can learn from. ERP Implementati

Wipro Studies TPS to Achieve Lean Transactions

By Jon Miller - August 13th, 2005

I was very excited about an article in Business Week titled “Taking a Page from Toyota’s Playbook” on how Indian info tech companies are adopting the Toyota model. As an example, Wipro visited a Toyota factory to stud

Mr. Toyota Goes to Washington

By Jon Miller - August 11th, 2005

The August 12, 2005 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Toyota Lobbies to Avoid Blame Amid U.S. Auto Industry Woes” explains how Toyota is adding a sixth lobbyist in Washington D.C. in an effort to avoid being bashed

Walls & Cubicles: Waste Multipliers in the Office

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2005

The key to Lean in the office is good information flow. In fact, all Kaizen activities done in the office should have this as their primary goal. One key factor we use in determining how Lean an office is (and if we can help them) is t

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

The Trap of Managing by Computer Screens

By Jon Miller - November 18th, 2004

One of the things that I notice when I go to offices in the US is walls everywhere and a computer screen at each desk. I recently lead a group of clients to Japan to visit a Toyota group company office that had taken the principles of

Product Development Performance Metrics

By Jon Miller - September 9th, 2004

During our Japan Kaikaku Experience trip in August, we visited Omron, a manufacturer of sensors and factory automation products. They have made great strides in implementing TPS, resulting in a very Lean factory. As part of their Lean

Lean Office

Start your improvement training today.