Gemba Academy

One Piece Flow & Standard WIP

By Jon Miller - October 12th, 2004

I learned a lesson about how easy it is to assume people understand something that sounds simple to you. Near the end of a recent Lean study mission in Japan, one of the participants who is a Six Sigma Black Belt, a dynamic change agen

If You Want to Pull, Don’t Deliver

By Jon Miller - October 5th, 2004

We received a nugget of wisdom from Mr. Nojima of the Logistics group of Yazaki (makers of Creform and Japan’s largest privately held company) during our October study mission to Japan. Mr. Nojima made a statement that “all

Why Kaizen Teams Should Be Cross-Functional

By Jon Miller - October 1st, 2004

The rule of thumb to have a good mix of kaizen team members from different areas is: 1/3rd of the people from the area or process targeted for kaizen, 1/3rd of the people from upstream or downstream processes (customers and suppliers)

Kaizen: Start with Production or “The Office”?

By Jon Miller - September 24th, 2004

Most Lean transformations and kaizen programs start at the Gemba (workplace, actual place where value is created) which for manufacturers is the factory. A question Lean Champions often come across is “Why are we starting kaizen

Flow Counterclockwise for a Good Reason

By Jon Miller - September 23rd, 2004

I came across an interesting article while riding the bullet train in August during our last Japan Kaikaku Experience (Lean study trip). In the September 2004 issue of Wedge magazine (Vol. 16 No. 9), science writer Hideaki Fukami explo

Making Standard Work Stick

By Jon Miller - September 18th, 2004

During a recent sales presentation to a prospective client, the issue of Standardization came up. This company has multiple factories around the globe and is struggling with a lack of harmonization between them. The Challenge of Standa

Product Development Performance Metrics

By Jon Miller - September 9th, 2004

During our Japan Kaikaku Experience trip in August, we visited Omron, a manufacturer of sensors and factory automation products. They have made great strides in implementing TPS, resulting in a very Lean factory. As part of their Lean

Lean and Green

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2004

One of the most enlightening moments in my personal journey was when I discovered the innovative approaches employed by top Lean companies in Japan to curb waste via efficient environmental management and energy conservation. We visite

Takt Time for Executives

By Jon Miller - August 19th, 2004

We recently had the opportunity to host 15 top executives from a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company for 3 days of Lean training, benchmarking tours, and strategizing. During this process, we gained insight into Takt Time. These

Extreme Programming & the Lean Office

By Jon Miller - August 3rd, 2004

Extreme Programming is an approach to software programming that puts two or more people in a team to work on one piece of code, at the same time, on the same computer. It might seem counterproductive to have two sets of hands and brain

Throughput, Bottlenecks, and Capacity: It’s All in the TPCBP

By Jon Miller - July 30th, 2004

One of the most under-appreciated items in the Lean tool bag is the Table of Production Capacity by Process (TPCBP, also known as Process Capacity Table). This one-pager can define the theoretical maximum output of any process by takin

Lean Fundamental: Do Today’s Work Today

By Jon Miller - July 28th, 2004

Working with clients struggling with non-Lean scheduling methods reminded me of the fundamental Lean principle of “Do today’s work today.” This principle involves avoiding late deliveries, matching capacity to demand,

Sustaining Results in the Lean Office

By Jon Miller - July 27th, 2004

At a Lean Office seminar, attendees raised the question of how to maintain office kaizen results. As with any type of kaizen, several factors need to be in place to ensure that the results achieved during an intensive week of improveme

Lean Customer Service

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2004

According to an often-cited statistic from Harvard Business Review: “Developing a new client relationship costs between six to eight times more than maintaining an existing relationship”. Spending six times more on customer

Questions from the Field #3: Lean Engineering

By Jon Miller - July 21st, 2004

The manager of System and Process Improvement encountered a third challenge while encouraging her engineers to adopt Lean thinking: “When a process is very detailed, what is the best way to map the process so that it does not get

Questions from the Field #2: Lean Engineering

By Jon Miller - July 20th, 2004

Continuing to collaborate with the manager of System and Process Improvement, to encourage the engineers to adopt Lean thinking, she encountered a second challenge: “How do we run to a variable Takt time, and are there other ways

Questions from the Field #1: Lean Engineering

By Jon Miller - July 19th, 2004

We received several good questions from a manager of System and Process Improvement attempting to do kaizen in engineering. She noticed that there were significant areas for improvement (known as Lean opportunities) within the engineer

Quality & Law Enforcement: Detection vs. Prevention

By Jon Miller - July 15th, 2004

During a kaizen workshop, the kaizen team identified the lack of value-added content in the final inspection process. This led to an interesting comparison of quality systems that do not practice Lean manufacturing principles, with the

Kaizen Events Build Buy-in

By Jon Miller - July 13th, 2004

During a dinner meeting, I had the chance to exchange views on the progress of the Lean effort at a client company with the President. They are early in the process, having trained all employees and having done two kaizens, and are on

Kaizen is Like Climbing a Mountain: Drive Stakes in Along the Way

By Jon Miller - July 12th, 2004

The team leader of a kaizen project, we’ll call him Tim, was very disappointed in the weeks immediately after the kaizen. During his routine check-in with the machine operators, he discovered that inventory was accumulating once

Kaizen is for Everyone, Everyday

By Jon Miller - July 10th, 2004

It’s encouraging to see that as the Lean buzz expands from manufacturing to healthcare and other industries, some organizations and practitioners are beginning to recognize that there is more to Lean than kaizen events, “Le

Making Sense of Takt-Flow-Pull

By Jon Miller - July 10th, 2004

We’ve found a wall that people must get past when learning to think Lean. Teaching the 7 Wastes and 5S as eliminating searching, motion, errors, (7W), etc. by reorganizing the work area and making it more visual (5S) strikes most

Applying Flow to Healthcare

By Jon Miller - February 4th, 2004

An increasing number of hospitals and healthcare organizations are getting seriously interested in applying Lean to their facilities and organizations. As we all know, healthcare costs are high and patient wait times are long. Anyone w

What is Jidoka? Test Drive a Minivan

By Jon Miller - January 14th, 2004

I will confess, we own a minivan and I enjoy driving it. It’s a great car. If I wasn’t already a fan of Toyota products and how they make them, the Sienna would undoubtedly make me a fan. As a Lean guy, I particularly like

Lean Practitioners Beware: You May be Tampering

By Jon Miller - January 10th, 2004

In a conversation with Daniel Sloan, Six Sigma Master Black Belt, CEO of Evidence-Based Decisions, and author of Profit Signals, I learned about a Deming idea known as “tampering“. What I learned is that we, as Lean practit

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