Gemba Academy

How Do Lean Processes Prevent Human Error?

By Jon Miller - March 24th, 2009

Scott asked an important question on how lean processes can be used to prevent human errors. The good news is that lean processes not only support quality but they lean cannot function without a strong quality culture and organizationa

Kaizen Exercise: Stand in the Circle

By Jon Miller - March 23rd, 2009

Class dismissed. Your assignment for today is to go stand in the circle. Waste never sleeps. We have an hour. Let’s go see. The assignment is simple: find a spot to observe the process silently. Stand and observe for 30 min. Writ

Do We Even Need the 4th and 5th S?

By Ron Pereira - March 20th, 2009

Jon Miller – my friend, mentor, and now business partner – has asked his readers some extremely interesting questions regarding whether the 4th and 5th S, in 5S are even needed. Your feedback will be used by us as we finish

Ask Gemba: Do We Need the 4th and 5th S?

By Jon Miller - March 20th, 2009

Personally I don’t care a great deal for the 4th and 5th S. The team activity of throwing things out, rearranging and cleaning things up can be a blast. Once that’s done and the excitement wears off, the daily maintenance a

Sandwich Making Muda

By Ron Pereira - March 19th, 2009

I absolutely love to watch people. And I don’t mean watch in a creepy kind of way… I mean I love to watch people work and do their jobs. Well, today I was getting some lunch at a restaurant I often go to and I noticed they had impl

10 Things the Amish Can Teach Toyota Leadership

By Jon Miller - March 18th, 2009

Some of my friend have shared stories with me recently of the genchi genbutsu trips Toyota executives from Japan have been making by visiting factories overseas. On their next visit they should take a slight detour to to one of the Mid

The Cost of Searching

By Ron Pereira - March 17th, 2009

Studies have shown that the average person can spend around 30 seconds every 5 minutes of their working day searching for something. That’s not too bad… or is it? Consider This Well, if you consider that this is 30 seconds out of a

Accountability for Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - March 16th, 2009

Last week a reader by the handle of CILean asked Gemba: I have trouble with staff who appear generally supportive of improvement projects and agree with Senior Management on proposed actions but then fail to implement agreed changes an

It’s Officially On: Gemba Academy Launches

By Ron Pereira - March 15th, 2009

Note, this post was originally written on March 15, 2009. See what Gemba Academy looked like back then. After many, many hours of PDCA (plan, do, check, act) the time has finally arrived for Gemba Academy to officially open its doors f

Gemba Academy Preview: Calculating Takt Time

By Jon Miller - March 15th, 2009

Gemba Academy opens for enrollment on Monday March 16th, 2009. In the coming months we will offer online training on topics on a wide range of business excellence topics from lean manufacturing, project management, six sigma and other

An Electrically Delicious Lesson on Kaizen

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2009

What would you do if given a do-or-die mission to create a battery out of simple, non-toxic materials, from a sustainable source, without using specialized equipment, with the added requirements that said battery must prevent scurvy an

The Greatest in the Kingdom

By Ron Pereira - March 12th, 2009

I was recently reading my all time favorite book and came across some comments that caused me to ponder a few of the articles I’ve recently written about being an expert and how many hours it takes to become an expert. Here’

Should Cross-trained Workers be Paid More?

By Jon Miller - March 12th, 2009

“Now that I can perform more tasks, pay me more.” This was the statement that an HR manager was struggling with recently at a company that is in the midst of introducing cross-training for multi-skilled operators as part of

5S Overview Video

By Jon Miller - March 11th, 2009

The launch of our online training service Gemba Academy is just days away. We have been busy at work readying online training courses for lean manufacturing, six sigma, project management and more. We will offer six month subscriptions

An Expert State of Mind

By Ron Pereira - March 10th, 2009

A person going by the name of “ford” left a very interesting comment to my post about it taking 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Here was the comment: “The moment one gets into the `expert’ state of mind

Kaizen and the Art of Elephant Eating

By Jon Miller - March 10th, 2009

Do you have an elephant that needs to be eaten? If you did, would you know? There is something called the elephant test which comes from the field of law. It is often used for cases in which something “is hard to describe, but in

"Lean Factories Find It Hard to Cut Jobs"

By Jon Miller - March 9th, 2009

…even in a slump, or so says an article in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s an unfortunate title with a collection of half-truths about lean manufacturing, some contradictory, that leaves one unsure at the end whethe

Web Check-In: Lean or Not?

By Ron Pereira - March 8th, 2009

The Pereira household has been battling flu like symptoms for over a week now. My kids have all had it and most recently my wife got it. I, knocking on wood, have escaped it so far but I am not getting cocky about it! In any event, at

Ambiguous Visual Controls: When Words Aren’t Necessary

By Jon Miller - March 8th, 2009

Visual controls must by definition be clear indicators of normal versus abnormal, go versus no go, okay versus not okay. The sign above isn’t at all bad compared to other ambiguous visual controls we’ve featured here or he

Lighting a Candle for Energy Sustainability

By Jon Miller - March 6th, 2009

There was a great teaching moment this week. As we were walking around the shop floor at the end of the day, the shift ended and people began streaming out of the factory. Soon the lights began to shut off. We were left alone, in the d

Spreading the Gospel with Web Video

By Ron Pereira - March 5th, 2009

Man, who would have thought a video I shot at around midnight with a crappy digital camera and some shop lights from Home Depot clipped to a step ladder – yes that’s exactly how I did it! – would be watched more than

The Art of Giving Instructions

By Ron Pereira - March 3rd, 2009

So, it would seem that the conversation between cake maker and customer went something like this. Cake Making Employee: Hello, how can I help you? Customer: I would like to order a cake for a going away party this week. Cake Making Emp

What’s All the Fuss About A3 Thinking?

By Jon Miller - March 3rd, 2009

Jim had a good point in his comment: I don’t understand the excitement about this so-called A3 thinking. Root cause analysis has been around for decades, so has five whys (at least since the very early 1980s.) As for hypothesis t

Porque é que esta água fria?

By Jon Miller - March 2nd, 2009

That is how the sun sets over the Amazon in the evening. But today let’s talk about how the water comes out of the shower in the morning, which is to say cold. When this happens one is faced with three choices: wait until the wat

Stop Shining… Clean to Inspect

By Ron Pereira - March 1st, 2009

The third S, in 5S, is commonly referred to as shine. A more accurate translation of the original Japanese word – seisou – is probably scrub or sweep. But shine works as well. Missing the Point But here’s the thing. Most people c

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