Gemba Academy

Process Mapping – Lean or Six Sigma Tool?

By Ron Pereira - January 16th, 2007

If someone walked up to your this morning at the coffee machine and asked you, “Is process mapping a Lean or Six Sigma tool?” what would you say? This may seem like a trivial question but I dare say it is not. Poka-Yoke is a Six S

Does Lean Manufacturing = The Toyota Production System?

By Jon Miller - January 15th, 2007

There is a very interesting discussion over at the Lean blog today in the post To Merge or Not To Merge…Lean & TPS. There were nine reader comments as of tonight, with many good viewpoints on the question of whether the arti

About Us

By Ron Pereira - January 15th, 2007

Hi there, my name is Ron and this blog is my attempt at explaining how I believe Lean and Six Sigma can and should work together in harmony. Contrary to the name of this blog I don’t believe it’s optimal to merge Lean and Six S

Creating Synergy with Lean and Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - January 15th, 2007

From Wikipedia: Synergy or synergism (from the Greek synergos, συνεργός meaning working together, circa 1660) refers to the phenomenon in which two or more discrete influences or agents acting together create an effect greater

Lean or Six Sigma?

By Ron Pereira - January 14th, 2007

This is my first official blog. I have long been impressed with the blogs of people like Jon Miller from Gemba Research and have finally decided to throw my hat into the blog ring. I thought I would focus my first blog on the topic of

Giving A Shout Out to a Few Gemba Bloggers

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2007

I would like to recognize a few fellow bloggers who consistently share genuine events and lessons from Lean manufacturing experiences on their gemba. Mike Wroblewski has promised to return to more active blogging with a post last week.

Words of Taiichi Ohno Sensei, Part 4: It’s a Race to Get People to Think

By Jon Miller - January 10th, 2007

I came across a new quote from Taiichi Ohno recently. It was in Japanese, and may not be new to the world, but I can’t recall seeing it in English before. I think it nicely captures the idea of kaizen and respect for people, whic

When Times Are Tough, Do You Make Better Decisions?

By Jon Miller - January 8th, 2007

I heard this in a meeting today “When times are tough you make better decisions.” I wonder if this is true. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and this means something similar. A common Toyota saying is 「�

Top 5 Lean Manufacturing Books for Beginners

By Jon Miller - January 5th, 2007

From time to time we get e-mails asking for recommendations on books or articles to read for people who are just starting out learning about Lean manufacturing and how the Toyota Production System applies to their business. The reading

Endless Creativity, Inquisitiveness and Pursuit of Improvement

By Jon Miller - January 2nd, 2007

In his New Year’s address Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe positions 2007 as a foundation building year. He acknowledges both that Toyota sees not only strong growth in demand for their products but also fierce competition. He

Selecting a Management and Improvement System

By Jon Miller - December 28th, 2006

Lean manufacturing is a system for managing and improving production operations. More broadly, Lean manufacturing principles can be applied to manage and improve any type of operation from healthcare to service and distribution, as we

Being an Improvement Agnostic

By Jon Miller - December 27th, 2006

A while ago my colleague and I were doing our best imitations of slick salesmen in front of a group of leaders from a small, local manufacturing firm. We were fired up after a tour of their factory, confident that space could be cut to

Holiday Shopping is Wasteful

By Jon Miller - December 26th, 2006

It’s time for my second annual Boxing Day railing against the waste caused by holiday spending at the year end. This year we find a December 23, 2006 Wall Street Journal article titled How Christmas Brings Out the Grinch in Econo

Note to Toyota: Top Five Things to Do in 2007 as World’s #1 Automobile Manufacturer

By Jon Miller - December 23rd, 2006

According to a Wall Street Journal article today Toyota Is Poised to Surpass GM As the Top Car Maker Next Year. That would be 9.04 million vehicles, just ahead of General Motors. Congratulations are premature, but it’s not too ea

Ford CEO Mullaly’s First Impressions

By Jon Miller - December 22nd, 2006

In the December 22, 2006 Wall Street Journal article titled Mulally’s ‘First Impressions’ published the letter from the former Lean leader of Boeing and now CEO of the Ford Motor to the employees of the company. He st

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 37: The Standard Time Should be the Shortest Time

By Jon Miller - December 21st, 2006

“Speaking of standards, time study is another thing everyone gets wrong.” The typical time study is based on taking 10 times and setting an average time as the standard. Ohno says this is very bad because if you are watchin

When is Point Kaizen OK?

By Jon Miller - December 19th, 2006

Point kaizen refers to small, isolated improvements that are easy to implement quickly. The impact of point kaizens are typically small but they can have a large impact. Point kaizen are in contrast to line kaizen, plane kaizen, cube k

The Starfish, the Spider and the Span of Five

By Jon Miller - December 17th, 2006

I just finished reading The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman nd Rod A. Beckstrom. It is a quick read with some interesting ideas. I have a number of issues with the book, and by

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 36: Only the Gemba Can Do Cost Reduction

By Jon Miller - December 15th, 2006

Taiichi Ohno begins the chapter by demonstrating the Toyota philosophy of “aim for 10X improvement, not 10% improvement”. He instructed Human Resources to give the shop floor 10 people even though they had asked for 100 peo

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 35: The Monaka System

By Jon Miller - December 10th, 2006

How many Japanese words do we have in the Lean lexicon? Do we really need another? It’s a rhetorical question, but would you rather have “sweet azuki bean jam wafer system”? I thought not. “Replaceable core syst

And Now We Have “Kakushin” (sigh…)

By Jon Miller - December 8th, 2006

In the December 9, 2006 Wall Street Journal article titled As Rivals Catch Up, Toyota CEO Spurs Big Efficiency Drive the Toyota Motor Corporation President Watanabe adds another Japanese word to the Lean lexicon: kakushin. Debates coul

When the Customer Defines Value, But They Define It Poorly What Do You Do?

By Jon Miller - December 6th, 2006

If a customer says “Here’s how I want to do Lean.” and the consultant says “That’s not the right way.” and the customer says “Who’s the customer here?” and the consultant says ̶

How to Put Kaizen into Your Culture

By Jon Miller - December 5th, 2006

These are the two steps for how to put kaizen into your culture. First, communicate with your people until you have a common agreement and 100% alignment on these principles: The reason we can make our living is because we serve our cu

One-Hour Low Tech Lean Introduction

By Jon Miller - December 4th, 2006

Today was a lesson for me in just-in-time delivery of Lean training (or Lean Lean training) and also in the value of being prepared. We arrived half a day late to a distribution center where we were asked to give Lean overview training

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 34: The Pitfall of Cost Calculation

By Jon Miller - December 1st, 2006

In this chapter Taiichi Ohno talks about the pitfalls of using cost calculation to justify new equipment purchases and also decisions to scrap or replace equipment based on depreciation. “Whenever we need to make a decision, we e

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