Gemba Academy

How to Give Lean Manufacturing a Bad Name

By Jon Miller - January 18th, 2006

One way that is almost guaranteed to stop a Lean manufacturing effort in its tracks is for management to announce that Lean manufacturing will be used to eliminate jobs. It’s hard to believe that anyone still does this, but the p

Pandemic Preparation: Just in Time or Just in Case?

By Jon Miller - January 16th, 2006

In a January 12, 2006 Wall Street Journal article (also on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette) titled Just-in-Time Inventories Make U.S. Vulnerable in a Pandemic raises a question that is very common to organizations first starting out imple

Hope for Lean at Local Government Levels

By Jon Miller - January 12th, 2006

A posting on the Evolving Excellence blog titled Putting Perfume on a Pig paints a grim picture how a panel of some of the so-called best minds brought together by the U.S. Department of Commerce think of U.S. manufacturing. Making thi

Respect for People? Labor Unrest at Toyota Kirloskar

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2006

There has been labor unrest at the Toyota Kirloskar joint venture in Bidadi, India over the last week. Indian business news has covered these events, but there has been very little mention of it in American or Japanese news. On January

American Workers Embrace Kaizen Culture at NUMMI

By Jon Miller - January 10th, 2006

There is an excellent article from September 2005 in the Manufacturing Engineering magazine about the GM-Toyota 50/50 joint venture NUMMI. In this excerpt form the article one of the team members who later became a team leader talks ab

Pit Crew Kaizen

By Jon Miller - January 9th, 2006

One of the aims of a Lean business model based on the Toyota Production System is to deliver products and services just in time, or exactly what the customer needs, when the customers needs it and in the exact amount they need. Product

Kaizen Means Thinking “Now Things are the Worst Ever”

By Jon Miller - January 6th, 2006

There has been a lot of discussion about “failing to become Lean” on blogs, in newsgroups and in books lately. Reading press releases and financial statements of many less-than-truly-Lean companies, they would like the anal

Happy New Year, and Genchi Gembutsu

By Jon Miller - January 3rd, 2006

I don’t mean to be lazy about crafting a New Year’s message, but once again the good people at Toyota have made my job easy. This is the first New Year for Mr. Watanabe as Toyota’s new President. In a memo titled New

Business Process Outsourcing, Meet Value Engineering

By Jon Miller - January 2nd, 2006

There’s a good article today in The Hindu Business Line that talks about how BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) firms in India are using kaizen, six sigma, Lean transactions and value engineering to streamline its already lowest-

Crossing the Chasm of Lean Transformation, Part 2

By Jon Miller - December 31st, 2005

Should the “wrong” approached be replaced by a path more closely following the one Toyota has taken? The “Training Within Industry” modeled approach to developing people and Toyota’s hyper cost-focused man

Crossing the Chasm of Lean Transformation, Part 1

By Jon Miller - December 30th, 2005

A friend of mine who is a VP of Operations at a Midwestern hospital asked me two questions a few days ago. The first was “What is the percentage of Lean implementations that fail?” This is a loaded question, and not one for

How to Kaizen Boxing Day

By Jon Miller - December 26th, 2005

One of the greatest evils that kaizen and Lean manufacturing attempts to eliminate is overproduction, one of the 7 wastes. Overproduction hides true capacity, exacerbates quality problems, builds inventory, and generally amplifies the

Are they Nuts? Lean Team Shouts “Do It First and Think Later”

By Jon Miller - December 23rd, 2005

Edson Oda Senior Operations Consultant It was funny to see some puzzled faces and hear some comments and jokes from those who had seen the NEC Lean manufacturing slogan or heard the Lean team shout loudly ‘Faço, Faço, Faço Já

Lean Engineering and Taking Down the Walls

By Jon Miller - December 22nd, 2005

Earlier this week I visited a customer who is just starting out with their Lean transformation. They are an engineering firm. They have toured another one of our clients who has succeeded in implementing Lean in their transactional are

Faça Primeiro e Pense Depois: What I Learned from Japan in Brazil

By Jon Miller - December 20th, 2005

On the Evolving Excellence blog today Bill Waddell admits he doesn’t speak Japanese, warns against drowning your Lean efforts with Japanese lessons, and takes on the Japanese for not being curious enough to visit and learn from his w

I’ll Have Some Innovation Please, but Hold the Kaizen

By Jon Miller - December 19th, 2005

Predictability can be a good thing or a bad thing. A friend of mine named John Cass is a guru in the areas of PR and corporate blogging. John pushed my buttons by pointing me at an article by Knowledge@Wharton from the Wharton School o

Dueling Views on Role of Kaizen Events for Lean Transformation

By Jon Miller - December 18th, 2005

Dueling views on the role of kaizen events in a Lean transformation were expressed in the latest SME Lean newsletter. George Koenigsaecker makes an attempt at answering the question Why aren’t there more lean successes? I just fi

The Cheerful Delusion of the Kaizen Mind

By Jon Miller - December 16th, 2005

The December 16, 2005 USA Today article titled Optimism Puts Rose-colored Tint in Glasses of Top Execs is an interesting study on strength and weakness of top executives, particularly their sometimes delusional optimism. The main point

A3 Report Title: 189 Apologies

By Jon Miller - December 14th, 2005

We don’t manufacture automobiles, but I know a bit about how it must feel when automobile companies issue a recall and have to ask many thousands of customers to bring in their vehicles to fix a flaw they have discovered. We found ou

Heads Firmly in Sand, Motor City Chairmen Speak Out

By Jon Miller - December 13th, 2005

General Motors Chairman Rick Wagoner asks why U.S. automobile manufacturers are doing so poorly when foreign ones are doing so well in the December 6, 2005 Wall Street Journal editorial A Portrait of My Industry. “Despite public

This Blog Has Been Kaizened to Accept Your Comments!

By Jon Miller - December 12th, 2005

We have upgraded our blogging platform! You are now invited to join the discussion about kaizen, Lean manufacturing and continuous improvement on our blog. You can post your comments in the field directly below each article. We look fo

Lean Food Service in Korea Factory Cafeteria

By Jon Miller - December 11th, 2005

I’ve been a fan of Korean food for a long time, but now I’m also a fan of Korean kitchenware. I’ve always thought the steel chopsticks were particularly a good idea. Here’s my dinner on a washable, reusable dinner tray

The Kaizen Cops Clobber Government Waste in Kenya

By Jon Miller - December 2nd, 2005

I’ve been chuckling quielty to myself for the past couple of days over an article I read. Now that I have internet access, I’d like share it with you. The Kenya News Agency headline screams, “Panic as Team Makes Abrup

Run Faster, Team

By Jon Miller - November 28th, 2005

There’s a great day-after-Thanksgiving Day piece on Joe Ely’s Learning About Lean blog. I missed the sports action over the weekend but Joe caught an American football coach’s half-time strategy for doing better in th

Gemba Keiei Chapter 12: Agricultural People Like Inventory

By Jon Miller - November 25th, 2005

Taiichi Ohno makes an interesting connection between the Japanese as historically an agricultural people and the fact that Japanese manufacturers seem to like inventory. Farmers growing rice are at the mercy of the weather. There are d

Gemba Academy Blog

Blog Archive