Gemba Academy

The Secret Lives of Toyota Term Employees, Episode 1

By Jon Miller - August 26th, 2007

Kaizen and respect for people. These are the words under which Toyota presents itself as a company that builds cars by building people. Yet this is the ideal, and we know that there is always a gap between reality and the ideal. What i

Lean Sushi

By Ron Pereira - August 26th, 2007

I came across a fun story of how a sushi shop uses lean principles to its advantage. Kura Zushi, operated by Kura Corp., is the third-largest player in the industry. What sets it apart is its just-in-time production system, similar to

Target, Actual, Please Explain

By Jon Miller - August 24th, 2007

I learned some important lessons today. One which I will share is to never compromise when it comes to placing visual status boards on the shop floor. Visual status boards promote problem solving and kaizen by exposing problems. There

Kaizen Song: We Demand Visual Controls

By Jon Miller - August 22nd, 2007

We Demand Visual Controls (to the music of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”) A fax was on my desk, it spoke of promises “My order isn’t there, hey when was it sent?” Which came as some surprise, logged in and

Teaching with LEGO

By Ron Pereira - August 22nd, 2007

I am passionate about teaching people the principles of lean and six sigma but this passion is nothing compared to how badly I want my children to learn and grow into well rounded/successful citizens. I often joke about how I intend to

Descriptive Statistics – Part 2

By Ron Pereira - August 21st, 2007

Last night in part 1 of this series we began our discussion of descriptive statistics by introducing the three measures of central tendency – the mean, median, and mode. As promised tonight we switch gears and are all about var

Is Your Lean Deployment “Made to Stick?”

By Jon Miller - August 21st, 2007

Mark Rosenthal is The Lean Thinker who connects the ideas from the book Made to Stick to visual controls used on the shop floor in a Lean factory. Mark argues convincingly for having “Sticky” Visual Controls in an article posted ye

Descriptive Statistics – Part 1

By Ron Pereira - August 20th, 2007

Tonight we are starting a two part series on descriptive statistics. Yeah, I know, many of you are likely having nasty flash backs of some professor with bad breath but by the end of this series I hope to make all those bad thoughts

The Essence of Shop Floor Management

By Jon Miller - August 20th, 2007

Chris Schrandt is a Gemba guy from Toyota who has wealth of experience in quality management and TPS. He had several great quotes during a problem solving class today, and this one about exposing problems struck me as particularly wort

Is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) a Theory?

By Jon Miller - August 18th, 2007

The tagline Theory of Constraints Exposed in an IndustryWeek article from March of this year got me thinking about TOC. Not a bad article by the way, although I’m still waiting for the Lean-TOC software system sales pitch shoe to

Six Sigma Control Phase is Not Anti-Lean

By Ron Pereira - August 16th, 2007

Last night I posted a question and now realize I was a bit too vague. This question was brought on due to a recent conversation I had with someone who asked me if I thought the “control” phase in the six sigma DMAIC road

45 Ways to Strengthen Kaizen Habits

By Jon Miller - August 16th, 2007

I have a suspicion that personal productivity bloggers are actually moonlighting Lean people. The 27 great tips to keep your life organized at Zen Habits contain advice familiar to us as one piece flow, bias for action, “zeroR

Is the Six Sigma Control Phase Anti-Lean?

By Ron Pereira - August 15th, 2007

Here is a question for you. Do you feel the Six Sigma “control” phase, the last in the DMAIC roadmap, is anti-lean in any manner? I will share my thoughts soon but am interested in hearing what others think first.

5S Know How from the Last Century

By Jon Miller - August 13th, 2007

We are going through a fairly thorough 5S exercise of our server. Just over 22GB of files were red tagged last week. Of the few items that were salvaged from the red tag folder was a series of notes by Brad Schmidt, President of Gemba

CEO Of Toy Manufacturing Company Commits Suicide

By Ron Pereira - August 13th, 2007

Today I read an article over on Industry Week that troubled me for much of the day. Most of us have heard of all the recent issues coming out of China related to quality and safety. One of the major stories was related to the paint

A Bureaucracy Which Enables Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 12th, 2007

The organizational characteristics of the Toyota Production System have been described as the combination of rigid and scripted rules with a high degree of flexibility to respond and change as needed. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. The

Words from a Motley Fool Genius

By Ron Pereira - August 12th, 2007

I have not blogged on the whole Nardelli taking over Chrysler topic mainly because so many people already have and I have grown bored of the topic… that was until I read this article on The Motley Fool. The article takes the m

Learning to Swim

By Ron Pereira - August 10th, 2007

My 2.5 year old daughter hit a major milestone last night. She swam by herself with no life jacket. She and her older sister (5 years old) took swim lessons earlier in the summer. My 5 year old caught on during the lessons and w

Newt Gingrich Wants to Kaizen the U.S.A.

By Jon Miller - August 10th, 2007

Newt Gingrich wants to kaizen the U.S.A. He talks of “a world that works, and a world that doesn’t” using the example of FedEx versus the U.S. Federal Government in this video clip on Youtube. In an August 7, 2007 spe

Toyota Production System Applied to Software Development

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2007

Some of the most interesting insights into the Toyota Production System come from the experiences people have with implementing the TPS outside of manufacturing. Whether it is in schools, hospitals, or software development firms, the c

Cooking up a Profit

By Ron Pereira - August 8th, 2007

No, this post is not about corporate fraud or funny accounting. Instead it is about a neat story I just read in the Columbus Dispatch (Go Bucks, beat scUM). The article is about Kahiki Foods, one of the largest Asian-frozen-food manu

Three Key Points to Kaizen Your Communication

By Jon Miller - August 7th, 2007

How well do you communicate what is truly important to your peers and to the people you teach? How often do you say “These three points are important. Write them down”? Here are three key points to effective communication:

7 Ways to Reduce Cost

By Ron Pereira - August 7th, 2007

I finished the book Gemba Kaizen by Masaaki Imai. It was quite good and I highly recommend it. It is chalk full of excellent tips like 7 ways to reduce costs in gemba (as Mr. Imai phrases it). They are: Improve Quality: Imai

Tell Us Your Lean Failure Stories

By Jon Miller - August 6th, 2007

Recently one of our consultants came back from a sales call having received the question from our prospective client “When has your firm failed in consulting engagements? Tell us your Lean failure stories.” Not having serve

The Big 200!

By Ron Pereira - August 6th, 2007

Yesterday I posted my 200th article on the blog! Also, today we received our 400th comment on the blog. Now many of these comments are from me responding to others (like the actual 400th comment) but hey who is counting! I have t

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