Tips for Lean Managers Archives | Page 13 of 22

Job Breakdown Sheets for Teaching TPS

By Jon Miller - September 8th, 2007

Job Breakdown Sheets are used as part of Toyota’s approach to OJT (on the job training), called Job Instruction. A Job Breakdown Sheet details the Major Steps, Key Points and Reasons for the key points. Having a Job Breakdown She

Three Key Points to Kaizen Your Communication

By Jon Miller - August 7th, 2007

How well do you communicate what is truly important to your peers and to the people you teach? How often do you say “These three points are important. Write them down”? Here are three key points to effective communication:

The Importance of “So What?” in A3 Kaizen

By Jon Miller - July 28th, 2007

One of the things that makes Toyota-style problem solving so effective is the insistence on true root cause analysis and countermeasures. In simple terms this is known as “asking why 5 times” or “5 why”. Instead

12 Quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. to Inspire Change

By Jon Miller - July 15th, 2007

Martin Luther King Jr. was a great leader and a historic change agent. Studying his quotes can inspire those of us who work to make positive change each day. King said: A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of c

Q&A During a Recent Gemba Walk

By Jon Miller - July 13th, 2007

Gemba walks are great fun. But it’s become clearer to me only recently that they can be awkward at first to the leader in transition from traditional style to Lean management. With permission and without revealing the identity of

Top 10 Improvement Tools Named After Lean Sensei

By Jon Miller - July 9th, 2007

1. Ohno Circle Taiichi Ohno was the Toyota executive largely responsible for structuring and implementing the system known today as the Toyota Production System over four decades after World War II. Ohno was known for drawing a chalk c

New Metric for Lean Leadership: MTBFTFTBF

By Jon Miller - July 8th, 2007

Those of you who are familiar with TPM or other progressive maintenance systems will recognize MTBF. The acronym MTBF refers to the mean time between failures. For products, MTBF is a reliability rating indicating the expected failure

Your Lizard Brain Wants to Help You Be Lean

By Jon Miller - July 2nd, 2007

An article on July 1, 2007 in LiveScience titled Study Reveals Why We Learn From Mistakes sheds light on why visual management and the habit of genchi genbutsu is so important to problem identification and learning. Once again, brain s

Intuition, Information and the Toyota Production System

By Jon Miller - July 1st, 2007

There are quite a few things that are counterintuitive about the Lean management system known as TPS. They are all fairly simple things, but hard to do since they feel wrong to people who have not been swimming in the waters of TPS for

The Secret to Calculating Takt Time in Your Head, Fast

By Jon Miller - June 26th, 2007

People are always amazed when I do takt time calculations lickety-split in my head. Here’s my secret: it’s the result of a lot of practice with doing math in the head, and memorizing a few nifty net available time numbers.

Tips for Lean Managers

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