Lean Archives | Page 140 of 157

Get Out of Here with that Stop Watch!

By Jon Miller - September 29th, 2008

Mike Wroblewski brought back more than a kimono from his benchmarking trip to Japan. His souvenir was of far greater value. In Japanese it is called the spirit of wa, or harmony. There is a great real life story on Mike’s Got Boo

Free Takt Time Video and Calculator

By Ron Pereira - September 28th, 2008

In this video, I demonstrate how to use this free Takt Time Calculator. Feel free to download the calculator and use it however you see fit. And if you’d like to learn more about what takt time is be sure to check out our Tra

The "3 Mu" of Lean Design

By Jon Miller - September 27th, 2008

Elimination of the “3 mu” is at the heart of kaizen and lean management. The three Japanese words are muri, mura and muda. The latter is most commonly known as waste and categorized in the 7 types of overproduction, invento

Taking Changeover Time into Account for Takt Time Calculation

By Jon Miller - September 25th, 2008

How do you calculate takt time when there are regular changeover times within the production process? There are several ways to answer this question. 1. Take changeover time out of net available time. Let’s say we have a food pac

The Right Way to Calculate Optimal Crew Size

By Ron Pereira - September 17th, 2008

Here’s the situation… the cycle time to produce one unit in our widget making factory is 300 seconds and the takt time for this product is 50 seconds per piece. In other words, in order to satisfy customer demand we need to produce

Real Life SMED

By Ron Pereira - September 15th, 2008

One of the best ways I’ve found to explain various lean and six sigma topics to others is to use examples from real life. After all, not everyone makes cars or the mirrors that go on cars… so many of the examples we read about in t

Are You Ready For Lean?

By Ron Pereira - September 8th, 2008

I just skimmed through a short white paper that attempted to provide a checklist to help an organization decide if they were ready for lean. It was written by a person who works for a “human capital management solutions” company. Y

Lean Tutorial: Production Capacity Template

By Ron Pereira - September 4th, 2008

To view a larger version of this video click here. Here is a free copy of the production capacity template I use in the video. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below. Finally, if you like th

Step Away From the Dashboard!

By Ron Pereira - September 2nd, 2008

Here’s a question for you. Is the mission control center of your organization centered on a set of dashboards or balanced scorecards? In other words, when a crisis is about to hit (or has already hit) how do you react? Do you run to

Womack’s Lean versus Ohno’s TPS

By Ron Pereira - September 1st, 2008

Harish, a reader of LSS Academy, recently sent the following question via email. Dear Mr. Pereira, I have been reading your insightful posts on TPS. I also came across your post on VSM. I have a quick question, of all the books I have

Lean

Start your Lean & Six Sigma training today.