The First Emperor of China Followed the Toyota Way?

By Jon Miller - November 12th, 2012

A November 2nd article in Sci-News.com proposes Toyota’s Labor Model Used in China 2,200 Years Ago. China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang is known as not only a conqueror and stabilizer of warring kingdoms, but a great standa

Panta Rei

By Jon Miller - November 11th, 2012

“If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change.” The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

How would you explain what Lean is to a 7-year-old?

By Ron Pereira - November 5th, 2012

Yesterday afternoon while driving home from a soccer game (and before I smashed into a Ford truck and obliterated the right side of my little Toyota… but that’s another story) my 7-year-old daughter (the swimmer and stud soccer pla

5 Critical Control Chart Characteristics You May Not Be Aware Of

By Ron Pereira - September 25th, 2012

No matter if you call yourself a “lean practitioner” or “six sigma practitioner” or some combination of the two… one “tool” you should have a deep understanding of is the control chart. I’ve written about control charts

How is PDCA Inimical to Innovation?

By Jon Miller - May 8th, 2012

PDCA. Plan, Do, Check, Act. This process is at the core of kaizen, lean, six sigma, continuous improvement, hoshin kanri, the scientific method and the learning organization. I also believe that the PDCA cycle is inherent to the creati

How to Tell if a Visual Control is Working

By Jon Miller - April 21st, 2012

Humans Wanted for Lean Journey. Small Wages, Bitter Cold, Constant Danger…

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2012

Ernest Shackleton was a British explorer celebrated for his exploration of the Antarctic. During the 1914-1917 expedition aboard the aptly-named Endurance, he lead his crew without loss of life through disasters which included their sh

Ambiguous Visual Controls: Never stay in rooms 601-617

By Jon Miller - April 10th, 2012

This ambiguous visual control creates more doubts than assurances. What is the message here? Do some people prefer and wish to be directed to the unclean rooms? Room 621 was in fact quite nice.

Yet More Musings on Muda

By Jon Miller - April 1st, 2012

Michel Baudin’s blog article More Musings on Muda, meant to end fruitless debate on the definitions and categorizations of the types of waste, in fact, led to some brief but interesting exchanges on Twitter. The discussion center

Webinar Replay: Using SPC to Make Better Management Decisions

By Ron Pereira - March 27th, 2012

Update: This webinar can now only be seen by subscribers to the Complete Lean Package. In this pre-recorded webinar, Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals and the upcoming book Healthcare Kaizen, showed how simple statistical process c

Lean, Bias, Impartiality and Justness

By Jon Miller - March 18th, 2012

I considered myself to be appropriately biased against biases, but it turned out I was wrong. Such is often the way with cognitive biases. Reading Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, I learned to think of biases in a

Kanban Systems Overview Video

By Ron Pereira - March 5th, 2012

Here is a free overview video introducing our Kanban course. And here’s a summary document of this video in PDF format that can be downloaded and printed. Visit gembaacademy.com to learn more about our available courses and acce

Improving Point of Use Lid Storage at Starbucks

By Ron Pereira - January 31st, 2012

On a recent visit to a Starbucks inside the San Francisco airport, I snapped a picture of their cup lid dispenser. As you can see they store lids in this unit and present it close to where the “final assembly” Barista does

Consumption Rate, Replenishment Time, SWIP and Why Glaciers Need Love

By Jon Miller - January 22nd, 2012

Over the past week, the greater Seattle area was met with the largest snowfall in a decade or two. Recently I was in New York City, where the season’s supply of snow had dropped last October, with barely a blizzard since. Back in

10 Books Every Continuous Improvement Practitioner Should Read in 2012

By Ron Pereira - January 12th, 2012

I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year and that things are off to an awesome start for you and yours! To help kick off the new year I thought I’d share a list of the 10 books I recommend all Continuous Improvement Practitioner

Kanban: The Art of the Japanese Shop Sign

By Jon Miller - January 4th, 2012

The kanban has met many adventures on its way to becoming a popular tool for the limitation of tasks, projects and works in process. As superhero origin stories go, kanban has an interesting one. As long ago as 8th century Japan, guide

The Best of LSS Academy – 2011 Edition

By Ron Pereira - December 29th, 2011

Well, friends, another year has come and gone.  As always, I’d like to sincerely thank each and every one of you for taking the time to visit LSS Academy. We now have more than 16,000 subscribers which is simply mind blowing! I

2011 Management Carnival Annual Roundup

By Ron Pereira - December 26th, 2011

I’m excited to take part in this years Annual Management Carnival. I chose three of my favorite blogs and hope you enjoy the following articles as much as I did. Dan Pink Jim Collins on 3 ways to avoid demotivating people at work

Gemba Glossary: Value Stream Mapping

By Ron Pereira - December 8th, 2011

Here is the next video in our Gemba Glossary video series. This one focuses on Value Stream Mapping. If you missed any of our earlier Gemba Glossary videos please follow the links below. Gemba Glossary: 5S Gemba Glossary: The 7 Waste

All Bleeding Stops Eventually

By Ron Pereira - December 6th, 2011

Here’s a fact you may not have realized… all bleeding stops eventually. The key question, of course, is how long it takes to stop it. Do we quickly apply a band-aid and limit the damage to our body or do we sit around and wait unti

The Courage to Try

By Ron Pereira - December 1st, 2011

I was recently speaking with a Gemba Academy customer who’s looking to start a small lean consulting company. I’ll call this person Bob for the sake of this article. About Bob Bob explained that he doesn’t have a college degree b

Live Built in Quality Seminar in Denton, TX

By Ron Pereira - November 29th, 2011

Peterbilt Motors, Gemba Academy and Kaizen Institute are pleased to present a half-day live workshop on Monday December 5th 2011 on the subject of “Built-in Quality”, one of the two pillars of the Toyota Production System h

Gemba Glossary: Value Stream

By Ron Pereira - November 10th, 2011

Here is the next video in our Gemba Glossary video series. This one focuses on the Value Stream. If you missed any of our earlier Gemba Glossary videos please follow the links below. Gemba Glossary: 5S Gemba Glossary: The 7 Wastes Gemb

Hoshin Planning – New Online Course from Gemba Academy

By Jon Miller - November 6th, 2011

The development team at Gemba Academy has been hard at work to bring you the latest online training course, Hoshin Planning. Currently the course includes 11 video modules, 1 quiz and 11 downloadable files. This brings the total number

The 7 Steps to Hoshin Kanri

By Ron Pereira - November 2nd, 2011

Gemba Academy recently added their 211th video to their constantly growing online and DVD based Lean Training System. This newest course is focused on Hoshin Planning, commonly referred to as Hoshin Kanri or Policy Deployment.  Durin