Gemba Academy

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

Book Review: One Small Step Can Change Your Life – The Kaizen Way

By Jon Miller - May 8th, 2005

This is an excellent book for anyone willing to try a new approach to making an improvement in your life. It is a 180 page book with small pages, an easy read for a weekend or an airplane ride. The combination of ideas based in science

The State of Lean Healthcare: Critical Mass is Building

By Jon Miller - May 7th, 2005

The development of the awareness and practice of Lean in the healthcare sector has been interesting to watch over the last several years. Although a great number of people who work in healthcare are still in the “unaware” c

Hyundai Throws Down the Glove

By Jon Miller - April 29th, 2005

According to news reports today April 29, 2005, Hyundai Motors is predicting that they will be the top quality producer by 2008, displacing Toyota. This is good news for Toyota and their kaizen efforts. Toyota needs a worthy challenger

It is Not Enough that Toyota Succeeds, GM Must Also Not Fail

By Jon Miller - April 25th, 2005

On Monday April 25th 2005 Chairman Hiroshi Okuda of Toyota gave a speech to the Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) in which he said “we are concerned about GM and other automakers” and called on Japanese automaker

Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing Metrics

By Jon Miller - April 22nd, 2005

In one of our Lean Manufacturing Benchmarking Tours to Japan (Japan Kaikaku Experience) the people on the tour had a goal to come up with company-wide metrics. The same metrics would be used for different business units so that the con

Lean Manufacturing with a Temporary Workforce

By Jon Miller - April 21st, 2005

One of the companies we visited in Japan in our Japan Benchmarking Trips (Japan Kaikaku Experience) employed a large percentage of temporary labor to help make their labor costs truly variable. One of the questions asked to them from o

100% Efficiency is Not the Goal

By Jon Miller - April 20th, 2005

As we do in each of our trips to benchmark the best lean companies in Japan, on our latest trip in March we visited Toyota. One of the surprising things to come out of this visit and later on our Q&A time with them was that Toyota

Walls & Cubicles: Waste Multipliers in the Office

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2005

The key to Lean in the office is good information flow. In fact, all Kaizen activities done in the office should have this as their primary goal. One key factor we use in determining how Lean an office is (and if we can help them) is t

Subtle Shifts in the 7 Wastes of Lean

By Jon Miller - April 15th, 2005

As followers of the Toyota Way we try to stay we try to stay true to the practices, principles, and values that come out of that great company. There is always a lot more to learn about what we call Lean (TPS). Toyota is always taking

Motivating Smart People to Learn about Lean

By Jon Miller - April 13th, 2005

Sometimes I’m forced to wonder why smart people fight good ideas. Sometimes I find answers. This was true recently when an engineer at one of our clients who was also the project manager for a factory layout redesign stubbornly r

Kaizen Event Fait Accompli

By Jon Miller - April 10th, 2005

The title may throw you for a moment, with French, English, and Japanese all in one. The phrase ‘fait accompli’ is French for “an accomplished and presumably irreversible deed or fact”. I realized during a recen

The Perfect World or Our Ideal World?

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2005

Iain Johnstone Operations Consultant TPS is a set of tools and philosophies that model the perfect world. What some organizations, their management team and Lean consultants forget is that we need to strive for our ideal world. The per

The Power of Mapping