Gemba Academy

Push, Pull, Paper Clips & Problem Solving

By Jon Miller - September 18th, 2007

The Toyota Production System, or what we call sometimes call Lean management, is simply the practice of planning, trying out your plan, reflecting (hansei) on what worked and what did not work and making adjustments through problem sol

Keep Your Kanban Cards Close to Your Genbutsu

By Jon Miller - September 17th, 2007

The primary function of a kanban card is to provide information about production instructions. Kanban cards contain information about where to produce and transport a particular product, when and in what quantity. For information to be

The Push vs. Pull Diversion Diversion

By Jon Miller - September 16th, 2007

I’m still scratching my head over an IndustryWeek article titled The Great Push vs. Pull Diversion by By Edward S. Pound and Mark L. Spearman of Factory Physics, consultants and writers of one of my favorite Lean books. They stat

The Secret Lives of Toyota Term Employees, Episode 3

By Jon Miller - September 14th, 2007

The Road to Tahara Prison A Toyota term employee and blogger named Maruo wrote 72 posts over 4 months on his experience working at the Tahara plant. His blog is called Welcome to Tahara Prison (田原刑務所へようこそ). He signe

What Are You Building?

By Jon Miller - September 13th, 2007

For those of us who are in manufacturers, or in some way involved in making things or helping others make things, we think in terms of what we build, the materials, tools and processes we use. How would you answer if you were asked

Change Leadership, Not Change Management

By Jon Miller - September 12th, 2007

The Hithchhiker’s Guide to Lean is one of the top 10 books on Lean thinking and a must read. We’ve never done a proper, full book review of Jamie Flinchbaugh and Andy Carlino’s book. This is not that full review, but

Calculating Rolled Throughput Yield (RTY)

By Ron Pereira - September 12th, 2007

One of the most powerful operational metrics I know of is Rolled Throughput Yield (RTY). It’s used to assess the “true” yield of a given process. This includes what we often call the “hidden factory” t

Awareness of a Problem Does Not Mean Much

By Jon Miller - September 11th, 2007

Reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been thought provoking. It is a book about the impact of the highly improbable events on our lives and on history, and why humans do not forsee such Black Swan events. There are many

Hope for Chrysler

By Jon Miller - September 9th, 2007

My hope for Chrysler is that Jim Press can act as a consensus builder and not a heroic, problem solving executive. What Chrysler doesn’t need is a wave of Toyota Production System implementation in their factories or a dose of To

Six Sigma in Japan

By Ron Pereira - September 9th, 2007

Here is a question I honestly don’t know the answer to. Do companies in Japan use Six Sigma? When I say Six Sigma I am referring to someone following the standard DMAIC roadmap in attempts to reduce variation, defects, etc.

Job Breakdown Sheets for Teaching TPS

By Jon Miller - September 8th, 2007

Job Breakdown Sheets are used as part of Toyota’s approach to OJT (on the job training), called Job Instruction. A Job Breakdown Sheet details the Major Steps, Key Points and Reasons for the key points. Having a Job Breakdown She

Humility

By Ron Pereira - September 6th, 2007

This past Sunday the readings for Roman Catholics around the world centered on the theme of humilty. The pastor of my parish gave an excellent homily on the topic and I wanted to share some of my own thoughts as it relates to the those

The Secret Lives of Toyota Term Employees, Episode 2

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2007

How to Pass the Term Employee Job Interview at Toyota The website “The New – Ask the Term Laborer Porsche” (新・期間工ポルシェに訊け) offers a fascinating glimpse into the secret lives of Toyota term emplo

Kaizen Song: It’s a Long Way to the Top (Teaching Takt, Flow, Pull)

By Jon Miller - September 5th, 2007

By Brad Schmidt Here’s a little back-to-school rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a Long Way to the Top (Teaching Takt, Flow, Pull) [To the tune of It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll) by A

Getting Started with Lean in the Office

By Jon Miller - September 3rd, 2007

One of the most common misconceptions about doing Lean in the office is that there is a different set of Lean tools for the office. We hear “What symbols should we use for value stream mapping in an engineering process?” or

Autonomous Maintenance in the Office

By Jon Miller - September 2nd, 2007

We are going through some design change tests at the Gemba blog as long-time readers may have noted. While testing the various functions and features to send back fix requests to our developer, I came across some reader comments and qu

Management Improvement Carnival #18

By Ron Pereira - September 2nd, 2007

The Management Improvement Carnival is one of my favorite aspects of John Hunter’s Curious Cat blog. John asked me to host the carnival this month and I gladly accepted. So without further delay here are some of my favorite

Game on!

By Ron Pereira - August 31st, 2007

I grew up watching Ohio State play football. I suppose I was watching them play as a young boy in Greenville, Ohio before I even knew what football was. My mom once told me, “You can take the boy out of Ohio (I live in Texas now), bu

Top 10 Books on Lean Thinking

By Jon Miller - August 30th, 2007

Here is a highly subjective list of the top 10 books on Lean thinking. Toyota Talent: Developing Your People the Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker and David Meier This book has the benefit of being new, and providing very practical and relev

Fun with Confidence Intervals – Part 2

By Ron Pereira - August 30th, 2007

Last night we began our discussion on confidence intervals. Specifically, we talked about the difference between population and sample parameters and how they play a major role in understanding what a confidence interval is. Tonight I

The Toyota Production System is Practice, Not Theory

By Jon Miller - August 29th, 2007

Pete Abilla from the Shmula blog, recently commented on one of our blog articles Is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) a Theory? He said: During my short time at Toyota, I learned this lesson well: we were always encouraged to “try

Fun with Confidence Intervals – Part 1

By Ron Pereira - August 29th, 2007

If I said the words “confidence intervals” would you know what I meant? What if I also asked if you could calculate them? If you answered no to either one of these questions I assure you will be able to answer yes by end of this tw

5 Decision Making Styles

By Ron Pereira - August 28th, 2007

Let’s suppose you are a parent and decide to ask your kids to help you make an important family decision. After careful consideration your kids share their thoughts with you only to learn the decision had already been made and

Why You Need A Tatakidai

By Jon Miller - August 28th, 2007

When people say to me “We don’t need no more stinkin’ Japanese words in our Lean vocabulary,” I don’t argue. Most of us aren’t using all of the ones we’ve got anyway. Why acquire knowledge you

Increasing Return on Net Assets (RONA) with Lean & Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - August 27th, 2007

The business metric RONA (Return on Net Assets) is used by many companies in order to gauge how well they turn their assets into income. I am no accountant but do know there are a few ways to calculate RONA. For the sake of this arti

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