Gemba Academy

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

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2005

Iain Johnstone Operations Consultant During a recent trip to a client, myself and a team of 5 from various manufacturing departments began mapping the first three weeks of their build process. The product is very complex and labor inte

Build a Lean Enterprise on a Stable Foundation

By Jon Miller - March 8th, 2005

It’s interesting how things come in threes. Recently the issue of stability and how it affects successful Lean implementation came up three times in rapid succession. Following up with a client of ours who is a candy factory (ver

On-time Delivery Starts with Trust

By Jon Miller - February 27th, 2005

On a recent trip to Dallas I had the chance to reflect on two different companies facing similar issues with poor on-time deliveries. One was an aerospace company and the other a consumer electronics company. Their production processes

OEE Basics from Europe

By Jon Miller - February 22nd, 2005

by Charles Lukey What is OEE and what can it do? OEE stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness. Done correctly, it can show you where your machines are losing money and what you can do about it. OEE is a powerful metric, calculated fr

The Four Elements for Sustaining Kaizen

By Jon Miller - February 19th, 2005

One of the most frequent questions we encounter form our customers and prospects is the issue of how to sustain the gains made through kaizen and other continuous improvement efforts. In a recent discussion among our consultants, we ca

Three Keys to Sustaining 5S

By Jon Miller - February 8th, 2005

Visiting a plant tour at a Midwestern cold rolled steel mill today, I had the chance to reflect on what makes a 5S effort sustained and successful. The owner took me through the mill and showed me a line at the start of the tour that w

Value Stream Maps & Right Brain Thinking

By Jon Miller - February 6th, 2005

With the increasing commitment of major firms to TPS-based Lean initiatives, Value Stream Maps are increasingly becoming items seen in board rooms as well as kaizen team rooms. George David, Chairman and CEO of United Technologies is s

Where to Start the Lean Journey: 5S or With VSM?

By Jon Miller - February 1st, 2005

From time to time the question comes up, as it did again this week, or where an organization should start their Lean journey. Should they do 5S first and remove the obvious clutter? Or should they Value Stream Map the entire process, i

Why does Toyota Share the Secrets of TPS?

By Jon Miller - January 25th, 2005

During an overview of TPS given during a Just In Time training class, one of the participants asked why it was that Toyota was willing to share their secrets with their competitors. This is a question worth thinking deeply about. Certa

Planning a Lean Journey? Take the Toyota Way

By Jon Miller - January 14th, 2005

A survey of members by the Lean Enterprise Institute’s in February of 2004 found that 36% of those surveyed were in the planning or starting phase of Lean implementation. This number may be even higher if the level of requests we

Genchi Gembutsu

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2005

As we being a new year, there have been humbling reminders of one of the fundamentals of the Toyota way, namely Genchi Gembutsu. In short this means “go to the actual scene (genchi) and confirm the actual happenings or things (ge

TPS is the Thinking People System

By Jon Miller - December 1st, 2004

Recently, a friend who is a Lean Manager for a local aerospace company gave us some insight into how Toyota is presenting TPS to the world. After studying at several Toyota facilities in Kentucky, he informed us that they are now calli

Gemba Keiei, Chapter 2: If You Are Wrong, Admit It

By Jon Miller - November 29th, 2004

In the second chapter Taiichi Ohno continues to gently lecture senior managers. He begins by answering the question of based on his earlier assumption “Why are we wrong half of the time?” by saying that our thinking is wron

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