Tips for Lean Managers Archives | Page 20 of 22

Small Companies Playing With Big Company Rules

By Jon Miller - October 17th, 2005

This is something I’ve noticed with a few of the sites I’ve been visiting lately. They are all part of a huge global, well-respected company and yet the Lean implementation is not as robust as we would like to see it. A lot

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

Work Content for Line Leads

By Jon Miller - August 28th, 2005

A line lead (or team leader) is defined as a leader of 5- 6 people in an area. There’s a lot of discussion on what a good line lead is. What is a good mix of work content for line leads? One school of thought is that the lead sho

Three Useful Phrases for Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2005

Finding myself in challenging discussions while coaching “change adverse” individuals from time to time, I try to make myself humble and ask “What would sensei do in this situation?” I cycle through the words an

Developing Team Leaders through Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 1st, 2005

Many companies ask some variation of the question. “Why aren’t we seeing bottom line results after the kaizen event improvements?” There is more than one answer, but I recently came across a good illustration of one t

Notes from the Field: Implementation and Continuity Safety Nets

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2005

Change is hard. What a cliche. But it has achieved its high rank in the pantheon of “cliche-dom” because its underlying reality is so very common. A fact multiplied many-fold during virtually any serious kaizen event. Cold

What About the 8th Waste?

By Jon Miller - July 14th, 2005

When learning to implement Lean manufacturing or Lean office principles one of the essentials is to develop a deep understanding of the 7 types of waste. Many people start working with the tools right away, value stream mapping or doin

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

Kaizen Event Fait Accompli

By Jon Miller - April 10th, 2005

The title may throw you for a moment, with French, English, and Japanese all in one. The phrase ‘fait accompli’ is French for “an accomplished and presumably irreversible deed or fact”. I realized during a recen

The Perfect World or Our Ideal World?

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2005

Iain Johnstone Operations Consultant TPS is a set of tools and philosophies that model the perfect world. What some organizations, their management team and Lean consultants forget is that we need to strive for our ideal world. The per

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