Gemba Academy

It is Not Enough that Toyota Succeeds, GM Must Also Not Fail

By Jon Miller - April 25th, 2005

On Monday April 25th 2005 Chairman Hiroshi Okuda of Toyota gave a speech to the Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) in which he said “we are concerned about GM and other automakers” and called on Japanese automaker

Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing Metrics

By Jon Miller - April 22nd, 2005

In one of our Lean Manufacturing Benchmarking Tours to Japan (Japan Kaikaku Experience) the people on the tour had a goal to come up with company-wide metrics. The same metrics would be used for different business units so that the con

Lean Manufacturing with a Temporary Workforce

By Jon Miller - April 21st, 2005

One of the companies we visited in Japan in our Japan Benchmarking Trips (Japan Kaikaku Experience) employed a large percentage of temporary labor to help make their labor costs truly variable. One of the questions asked to them from o

100% Efficiency is Not the Goal

By Jon Miller - April 20th, 2005

As we do in each of our trips to benchmark the best lean companies in Japan, on our latest trip in March we visited Toyota. One of the surprising things to come out of this visit and later on our Q&A time with them was that Toyota

Walls & Cubicles: Waste Multipliers in the Office

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2005

The key to Lean in the office is good information flow. In fact, all Kaizen activities done in the office should have this as their primary goal. One key factor we use in determining how Lean an office is (and if we can help them) is t

Subtle Shifts in the 7 Wastes of Lean

By Jon Miller - April 15th, 2005

As followers of the Toyota Way we try to stay we try to stay true to the practices, principles, and values that come out of that great company. There is always a lot more to learn about what we call Lean (TPS). Toyota is always taking

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

The Power of Mapping