Gemba Academy

Gemba’s Consulting Work Featured on NIST Website

By Jon Miller - January 18th, 2006

Gemba’s consulting work at Blue Diamond Manufacturing, a division of DeLaval, has been featured at the national website of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). Here’s a quote by Ken Johnson, the General Ma

Pandemic Preparation: Just in Time or Just in Case?

By Jon Miller - January 16th, 2006

In a January 12, 2006 Wall Street Journal article (which you can also find on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette) titled Just-in-Time Inventories Make U.S. Vulnerable in a Pandemic raises a question that is very common to organizations first

Governor Vilsack Plans to Create Lean Manufacturing Institute in Iowa

By Jon Miller - January 15th, 2006

Governor Tom Vilsack has been at the forefront of his commitment to Lean government in Iowa. One example is the use of kaizen for the Air Quality Permit processingat the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. Another example of Lean gov

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

Respect for People? Labor Unrest at Toyota Kirloskar

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2006

There has been labor unrest at the Toyota Kirloskar joint venture in Bidadi, India over the last week. Indian business news has covered these events, but there has been very little mention of it in American or Japanese news. On January

American Workers Embrace Kaizen Culture at NUMMI

By Jon Miller - January 10th, 2006

Here is a link to an excellent article from September 2005 in the Manufacturing Engineering magazine about the GM-Toyota 50/50 joint venture NUMMI. In this excerpt form the article one of the team members who later became a team leader

Pit Crew Kaizen

By Jon Miller - January 9th, 2006

One of the aims of a Lean business model based on the Toyota Production System is to deliver products and services just in time, or exactly what the customer needs, when the customers needs it and in the exact amount they need. Product

Kaizen Means Thinking “Now Things are the Worst Ever”

By Jon Miller - January 6th, 2006

There has been a lot of discussion about “failing to become Lean” on blogs, in newsgroups and in books lately. Reading press releases and financial statements of many less-than-truly-Lean companies, they would like the anal

Happy New Year, and Genchi Gembutsu

By Jon Miller - January 3rd, 2006

I don’t mean to be lazy about crafting a New Year’s message, but once again the good people at Toyota have made my job easy. This is the first New Year for Mr. Watanabe as Toyota’s new President. In a memo titled New

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-

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