Gemba Academy

Thankful but Dissatisfied

By Jon Miller - November 25th, 2006

Reflecting on this Thanksgiving holiday, I have a lot to be thankful for but I am dissatisfied. It has been a challenging year in many ways, both personally and in business. I am thankful that there are so many problems in front of me

How to Stay Out of Trouble with Mr. Convis

By Jon Miller - November 23rd, 2006

Gary Convis is the senior vice president of manufacturing in North America for Toyota Motor Corporation. In a November 20, 2006 article in the Lexington Herald-Leader titled ,New Tundra Plant Just Shows that … Toyota Keeps on Tru

The Water Spider: What’s in a Name?

By Jon Miller - November 22nd, 2006

One of the things that keeps Lean manufacturing from being boring to the amateur linguist is the many odd-sounding words that make up the Lean lexicon. Kamishibai Heijunka Pareto Yamazumi Takt Andon Jidoka Kaizen Pokayoke Gemba And don

What is a Kamishibai?

By Jon Miller - November 21st, 2006

I heard the term kamishibai (紙芝居) used in the context of the Toyota Production System for the first time in 2006. It was at an LEI seminar hosted by a former Toyota manager. At the time I thought it was a gratuitous use of a Japa

Dissatisfaction: The Essence of Toyota Management and the Kaizen Mindset

By Jon Miller - November 20th, 2006

I’ve said again and again that complacency and being satisfied with the current condition are anathema to kaizen. The article in Fast Company December/January 2006 issue titled “No Satisfaction” is excellent. Here are

Top 5 Things I Learned in China Last Week

By Jon Miller - November 19th, 2006

Here are the top five things learned after a productive week in China: 1. You can’t overstate the value of respecting another’s culture I gave my rudimentary Chinese a workout this time and the results were interesting. Doo

Why Six Sigma is Essential for Kaizen Success

By Jon Miller - November 18th, 2006

Genchi gembutsu means that in a Lean organization improvement must be done at the closest point to the value-adding workplace (gemba) following the scientific method based on facts. I’ve liked genchi gembutsu and management by fa

Seeing the Lean in Milton Friedman’s Ideas

By Jon Miller - November 17th, 2006

Nobel prize winner and Chicago school free market economist and author Milton Friedman has just passed away. The impact of his ideas are huge. It ranks with the impact of the ideas of Henry Ford and Taiichi Ohno. Like Ohno and Ford, Fr

Believing You Can Get Lean Makes You Leaner

By Jon Miller - November 16th, 2006

If Lean for Toyota is “kaizen and respect for people” we need to spend some time understanding what makes people work as well as what makes kaizen work. To that end, there are some very interesting findings at the Psycholog

Kaizen of the Month at Gemba, November 2006

By Jon Miller - November 13th, 2006

Like many companies, we make a lot of improvements each month at Gemba. We don’t always think to write them down or celebrate them. We will “kaizen the kaizen” by writing them down in an effort to be more mindful of t

The Toyota Preparation System or the “Bank of Preparation”

By Jon Miller - November 9th, 2006

Toyota is great at doing what appear to be common sense things extraordinarily well. They take the time to do preparation, then execute quickly. There is a reference to this in Jeffrey Liker’s The Toyota Way where (I am paraphrasing)

Kaizen vs. Kaikaku

By Jon Miller - November 5th, 2006

While “kaizen” has been a familiar term in English management vocabulary for decades, “kaikaku” is more recent. Though kaizen has been widely embraced by Japanese companies for years, kaikaku was less common. Ho

Things They Say at Toyota: Being Busy is Shameful

By Jon Miller - November 2nd, 2006

Being busy is shameful. What an odd thought. It goes against the workaholic nature of most Americans and our Puritan work ethic. I can’t recall exactly where I heard this but it was definitely from one of my sensei who came from

Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement

By Jon Miller - October 31st, 2006

Scientist, philosopher and author David Bohm presents challenging ideas on the nature of reality. They are challenging not in that they are difficult (if you are patient with the Calculus) but in that they challenge how we perceive, th

Reflection (Hansei) is the Noblest Teacher

By Jon Miller - October 30th, 2006

Hansei is a Japanese word meaning “reflection” as in reflecting on ideas or experiences in order to learn from successes or failures to improve oneself in the future. It is a key step in kaizen, both personal improvement an

Don’t Talk to Us About Toyota

By Jon Miller - October 28th, 2006

“Don’t talk to us about Toyota” demanded a new customer recently. Their reasoning was that Toyota’s level was unachievable for them. This client does not build cars. But they were asking for world class benchmar

How to Use 3P to Work Out Process Design Alternatives

By Jon Miller - October 25th, 2006

Apoorva from India asks, “Generally how many alternatives are worked out in 3P?” Production Preparation Process, or 3P as it is known, is the name used to describe the American consulting market’s understanding of the

Kaizen Suggestions at Nokia Factory in India Improve Quality

By Jon Miller - October 24th, 2006

There is an article in the Hindu Business Line on October 23, 2006 titled Smart Ideas at Work. The 3,500 workers at the Nokia factory in Chennai, India gave 1,800 kaizen ideas as part of their suggestion system. Many kaizen ideas seem

Educating People is Key to Operational Excellence

By Jon Miller - October 23rd, 2006

TPS is a system of training. These are the words from an article by Toyota on the TPS. The source escapes me at the moment, if anyone knows of it please add a comment. It’s my personal belief that the thing that sets Toyota apart

Lessons from Toyota’s IT Strategy

By Jon Miller - October 22nd, 2006

There are some interesting lessons from Toyota’s IT Strategy in the minutes from the Third IT Economics Salon of the Economic and Social Research Institute which is part of the Cabinet Office of the Japanese Government. The guest

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 32: Operational Availability vs. Rate of Operation

By Jon Miller - October 20th, 2006

In this chapter Taiichi Ohno introduces another concept that is mixed up by people. It is the difference between operational availability and rate of operation. I introduced this concept in some depth in a previous post on this blog, a

Things They Say at Toyota: Ask “Why?” Five Times

By Jon Miller - October 19th, 2006

One of the ways to judge whether a company is succeeding in their journey towards being an organization that embraces continuous improvement based on the Toyota Production System model is how often people ask “why?” as part

How Wipro Adapted the Toyota Production System to IT Work

By Jon Miller - October 17th, 2006

An article titled How Wipro Took a Leaf Out of Toyota’s Book in DNA – Daily News & Analysis on October 15, 2006 talks of how Wipro has successfully implemented the Toyota Production System in an IT business. Wipro is an Ind

How Do U Spell Quality?

By Jon Miller - October 16th, 2006

I spent four nights recently at Quality Inn, an American hotel chain. It was a pleasant stay, and not without its lesson in kaizen. I came back to the hotel one night to notice the following: I couldn’t resist taking them up on t

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 31: There is a Correct Sequence to Kaizen

By Jon Miller - October 15th, 2006

Taiichi Ohno explains in this chapter that there is a correct sequence to kaizen, and it is as follows: 1) Manual work kaizen 2) Equipment kaizen 3) Process kaizen “Manual work kaizen means thinking of better ways of using the ex

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