Gemba Academy

Work Content for Line Leads

By Jon Miller - August 28th, 2005

A line lead (or team leader) is defined as a leader of 5- 6 people in an area. There’s a lot of discussion on what a good line lead is. What is a good mix of work content for line leads? One school of thought is that the lead sho

Strong Supervision: The Key to Long-term Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 27th, 2005

A few weeks ago I had lunch with Tom Berghan, Lean Manager at Genie Industries. He is an avid student of the Toyota Production System and is always good for practical insights into ground-level Lean implementation. Tom observed that as

Gemba Keiei, Chapter 6: The Blind Spot in Cost Calculation

By Jon Miller - August 25th, 2005

Let’s start off with a bit of background on the Toyota Production System (TPS) and what has come to be called Lean manufacturing in the West. One of the pillars of TPS as envisioned and developed by Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno,

Gemba Keiei, Chapter 5: Misconceptions Hidden within Common Sense

By Jon Miller - August 20th, 2005

This is a short chapter. The chapter seems to act as a thematic bridge. Taiichi Ohno begins by talking about the importance of making a mindset shift in order to achieve breakthrough kaizen results, and ends the chapter by talking abou

Gemba Keiei, Chapter 4: Go See What Didn’t Work with Your Own Eyes

By Jon Miller - August 15th, 2005

Taiichi Ohno starts this chapter by pointing out that it’s relatively easy to convince the people on the Gemba (factory floor) by having them try the new way and see that is better than another way, but that this is harder to con

Wipro Studies TPS to Achieve Lean Transactions

By Jon Miller - August 13th, 2005

I was very excited about an article in Business Week titled “Taking a Page from Toyota’s Playbook” on how Indian info tech companies are adopting the Toyota model. As an example, Wipro visited a Toyota factory to stud

Mr. Toyota Goes to Washington

By Jon Miller - August 11th, 2005

The August 12, 2005 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Toyota Lobbies to Avoid Blame Amid U.S. Auto Industry Woes” explains how Toyota is adding a sixth lobbyist in Washington D.C. in an effort to avoid being bashed

Three Useful Phrases for Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2005

Finding myself in challenging discussions while coaching “change adverse” individuals from time to time, I try to make myself humble and ask “What would sensei do in this situation?” I cycle through the words an

Gemba Keiei, Chapter 3: Misconceptions Reduce Productivity

By Jon Miller - August 5th, 2005

In this chapter Taiichi Ohno illustrates the idea that “misconceptions reduce productivity” by telling several stories from the Gemba at Toyota. The point Ohno makes in this chapter is that demonstrating the superiority of

Developing Team Leaders through Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 1st, 2005

Many companies ask some variation of the question. “Why aren’t we seeing bottom line results after the kaizen event improvements?” There is more than one answer, but I recently came across a good illustration of one t

Notes from the Field: Implementation and Continuity Safety Nets

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2005

Change is hard. What a cliche. But it has achieved its high rank in the pantheon of “cliche-dom” because its underlying reality is so very common. A fact multiplied many-fold during virtually any serious kaizen event. Cold

Lean Healthcare: Increase Value or Reduce Waste?

By Jon Miller - July 25th, 2005

Today I had the opportunity to address the general session of the 43rd annual conference of the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management. There were about 1,500 people in the audience, perhaps 1,000 Materials Mana

Kaizen in the Naval Air Command

By Jon Miller - July 23rd, 2005

The U.S. Armed Forces have been using a combination of quality improvement tools and methods for many years. Recently many bases, depots and command centers have been using Lean manufacturing and six sigma tools and principles very eff

What About the 8th Waste?

By Jon Miller - July 14th, 2005

When learning to implement Lean manufacturing or Lean office principles one of the essentials is to develop a deep understanding of the 7 types of waste. Many people start working with the tools right away, value stream mapping or doin

Toyota Raises Prices, but Not for That Reason

By Jon Miller - July 10th, 2005

Toyota announced 1.6% price increases in several Lexus and Scion model vehicles on Friday July 8, 2005. Some months ago when Chairman Okuda said Toyota may raise prices to help out struggling Ford and GM, I was impressed again by Toyot

Kaizen Teams & the Wisdom of Crowds

By Jon Miller - July 7th, 2005

Every now and then a very intelligent manager or engineer will question the whole approach of putting a kaizen team together to spend 3 to 5 days working on a problem when the solution is ‘obvious’ to this very smart person

What You Can Learn in Traffic about Lean Manufacturing

By Jon Miller - July 2nd, 2005

As a resident of the Puget Sound area of Washington State, the subject of traffic flow is one of high interest to me. Traffic around the Seattle consistently ranks in the worst five in the United States. So a July 1, 2005 Wall Street J

Qingdao Haier’s Bids for Maytag: LeanSigma Goes to China?

By Jon Miller - June 23rd, 2005

Qingdao Haier, the giant Chinese appliance manufacturer along with Blackstone Group and Bain Capital has placed a bid to acquire Maytag. Their bid is $2 per share higher than the competing bid from Ripplewood Holdings. It is far from a

95% Cost Reduction: That’s Kaikaku

By Jon Miller - June 19th, 2005

According to a June 17, 2005 article in the Financial Times, Toyota plans to cut the cost of hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles by from $1,000,000 to $50,000 by 2015. That is a 95% cost reduction, in 10 years. The Lean manufacturing e

Lean & Assembly Line Throughput Times

By Jon Miller - June 18th, 2005

Who or what is telling people to look at throughput time (lead-time) through the assembly line when measuring productivity? This number is completely unrelated to assembly line productivity. I have run into the situation where people c

Making Work As Simple as Possible (but Not Simpler)

By Jon Miller - June 11th, 2005

I was reminded again this week at how easy it is to make things more complicated than necessary. This is true in so many ways. When asked “What is Lean?” by people who really want to know, it is tempting to explain the enti

Holding Up the Top Half of the Value Stream Map

By Jon Miller - June 6th, 2005

One of our clients has 3 people in their Lean department and about 1,000 people in IT. I recently met about 30 of them at a planning meeting for a new factory. They were all very nice people. To be fair there is also a group of manufac

The Forest and the Trees: a Lesson in Change

By Jon Miller - May 30th, 2005

There is a saying “Not seeing the forest for the trees” which means that you can’t see the overall situation because you are too focused on one or more of the smaller details. This is a common challenge for people try

Teaching Lean without Words

By Jon Miller - May 29th, 2005

The last few months I have been working with customers in lands where they don’t speak English as a first language. This has helped me better understand what my Japanese teachers said and did as they taught kaizen in the U.S. It

Balancing Market Leadership and Social Responsibility at Toyota

By Jon Miller - May 14th, 2005

It has been an interesting week for Toyota watchers. In response to Chairman Okuda’s call to Japanese automobile makers last week to raise prices to give GM some “breathing room”, Toyota’s operational executives

Gemba Academy Blog

Blog Archive