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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

Focus on Flow Streamlines 5S

By Jon Miller - December 26th, 2003

At the core of Lean Enterprise Transformation are the fundamental principles of customer focus, getting rid of the 7 wastes and creating flow. What follows is the alphabet soup of Lean tools in order to achieve this, including but not

Be Careful What You Measure, You Just Might Improve It

By Jon Miller - December 22nd, 2003

A continuous improvement manager at a mortgage processing firm told us how their Risk Assessment team was struggling. The company’s sales force comprises independent mortgage brokers who are responsible for enrolling individuals

Attacking Waste in Knowledge Work

By Jon Miller - December 11th, 2003

There are 7 types of waste, according to Taiichi Ohno. Attacking these 7 wastes is what makes a company Lean and able to create more value faster. This is also true in the office. Most wastes in the factory are easy to spot. Things suc

The Lean Factory is Not an Orchestra

By Jon Miller - December 9th, 2003

The idea of an orchestra is sometimes used to explain Takt Time (the beat of production paced to customer demand). In an orchestra, all instruments (processes) play music (perform production) to the same beat (customer demand), but

Pockets of Improvement

By Jon Miller - November 18th, 2003

We had the opportunity recently to give a Lean Enterprise overview presentation to the parent company of a client. The parent company had recently purchased our client, and they were interested in what Lean could do for them. Our clien

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