Gemba Academy

Gemba Keiei, Chapter 3: Misconceptions Reduce Productivity

By Jon Miller - August 5th, 2005

In this chapter Taiichi Ohno illustrates the idea that “misconceptions reduce productivity” by telling several stories from the Gemba at Toyota. The point Ohno makes in this chapter is that demonstrating the superiority of

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

Lean Healthcare: Increase Value or Reduce Waste?

By Jon Miller - July 25th, 2005

Today I had the opportunity to address the general session of the 43rd annual conference of the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management. There were about 1,500 people in the audience, perhaps 1,000 Materials Man

Kaizen in the Naval Air Command

By Jon Miller - July 23rd, 2005

The U.S. Armed Forces have been using a combination of quality improvement tools and methods for many years. Recently many bases, depots and command centers have been using Lean manufacturing and six sigma tools and principles very eff

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

Toyota Raises Prices, but Not for That Reason

By Jon Miller - July 10th, 2005

Toyota announced 1.6% price increases in several Lexus and Scion model vehicles on Friday July 8, 2005. Some months ago when Chairman Okuda said Toyota may raise prices to help out struggling Ford and GM, I was impressed again by Toyot

Kaizen Teams & the Wisdom of Crowds

By Jon Miller - July 7th, 2005

Every now and then a very intelligent manager or engineer will question the whole approach of putting a kaizen team together to spend 3 to 5 days working on a problem when the solution is ‘obvious’ to this very smart person

What You Can Learn in Traffic about Lean Manufacturing

By Jon Miller - July 2nd, 2005

As a resident of the Puget Sound area of Washington State, the subject of traffic flow is one of high interest to me. Traffic around the Seattle consistently ranks in the worst five in the United States. So a July 1, 2005 Wall Street J

Qingdao Haier’s Bids for Maytag: LeanSigma Goes to China?

By Jon Miller - June 23rd, 2005

Qingdao Haier, the giant Chinese appliance manufacturer along with Blackstone Group and Bain Capital has placed a bid to acquire Maytag. Their bid is $2 per share higher than the competing bid from Ripplewood Holdings. It is far from a

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