Lean Archives | Page 60 of 67

13 Lean Leadership Lessons from Dwight D. Eisenhower

By Jon Miller - October 14th, 2008

Dwight D. Eisenhower served as the 34th President of the United States of America, from 1953 to 1961. He was born on October 14, 1890. Today is the 108th anniversary of his birth. Eisenhower was a man of great insight gained through ac

Winners of Lean Hospital Books

By Jon Miller - October 10th, 2008

Many thanks to everyone who commented and contributed to the conversation this week about lean healthcare through the Q&A series with Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals. I hope soon others will publish similar books on lean gov

Defragmentation, Lean Systems and Putting Back Things Where They Belong

By Jon Miller - October 7th, 2008

Defragmentation: correcting existing fragmentation by reorganizing files and free space back into contiguous areas. Most of us have run the defragmentation tool on our computer hard drives. If you never have, you may want to do it now.

Q&A with Mark Graban, Author of Lean Hospitals

By Jon Miller - October 3rd, 2008

Whenever we can use kaizen to improve not only our economy but the other pillars of a whole society such as education or healthcare, we are truly blessed. Next week we will be learning a lot about how hospitals are applying lean manage

Jeffrety Gitomer Tears a Few Pages from Toyota's Playbook

By Jon Miller - October 2nd, 2008

Today I want to share with you something that came in the weekly e-mail from sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer. I don’t love sales nearly enough to put into practice everything Mr. Gitomer has to teach, but his passion and insights are

Use Only Reliable, Thoroughly Tested Means

By Jon Miller - September 30th, 2008

Principle number 8 of the Toyota Way, as defined in Jeffrey Liker’s book of the same name states: Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes. Software code is mostly reliable once it is

Get Out of Here with that Stop Watch!

By Jon Miller - September 29th, 2008

Mike Wroblewski brought back more than a kimono from his benchmarking trip to Japan. His souvenir was of far greater value. In Japanese it is called the spirit of wa, or harmony. There is a great real life story on Mike’s Got Boo

Free Takt Time Video and Calculator

By Ron Pereira - September 28th, 2008

In this video, I demonstrate how to use this free Takt Time Calculator. Feel free to download the calculator and use it however you see fit. And if you’d like to learn more about what takt time is be sure to check out our Tra

The "3 Mu" of Lean Design

By Jon Miller - September 27th, 2008

Elimination of the “3 mu” is at the heart of kaizen and lean management. The three Japanese words are muri, mura and muda. The latter is most commonly known as waste and categorized in the 7 types of overproduction, invento

Taking Changeover Time into Account for Takt Time Calculation

By Jon Miller - September 25th, 2008

How do you calculate takt time when there are regular changeover times within the production process? There are several ways to answer this question. 1. Take changeover time out of net available time. Let’s say we have a food pac

The Right Way to Calculate Optimal Crew Size

By Ron Pereira - September 17th, 2008

Here’s the situation… the cycle time to produce one unit in our widget making factory is 300 seconds and the takt time for this product is 50 seconds per piece. In other words, in order to satisfy customer demand we need to produce

Real Life SMED

By Ron Pereira - September 15th, 2008

One of the best ways I’ve found to explain various lean and six sigma topics to others is to use examples from real life. After all, not everyone makes cars or the mirrors that go on cars… so many of the examples we read about in t

Are You Ready For Lean?

By Ron Pereira - September 8th, 2008

I just skimmed through a short white paper that attempted to provide a checklist to help an organization decide if they were ready for lean. It was written by a person who works for a “human capital management solutions” company. Y

Lean Tutorial: Production Capacity Template

By Ron Pereira - September 4th, 2008

To view a larger version of this video click here. Here is a free copy of the production capacity template I use in the video. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below. Finally, if you like th

Step Away From the Dashboard!

By Ron Pereira - September 2nd, 2008

Here’s a question for you. Is the mission control center of your organization centered on a set of dashboards or balanced scorecards? In other words, when a crisis is about to hit (or has already hit) how do you react? Do you run to

Womack’s Lean versus Ohno’s TPS

By Ron Pereira - September 1st, 2008

Harish, a reader of LSS Academy, recently sent the following question via email. Dear Mr. Pereira, I have been reading your insightful posts on TPS. I also came across your post on VSM. I have a quick question, of all the books I have

Rat Racing and Lean Thinking

By Ron Pereira - August 20th, 2008

The recent post about my credit card issues has created quite a conversation. One of the main themes being commented on is whether or not we, in America where we don’t have the chip like they do in the UK, should have to show an ID w

Do you Use VSM Software?

By Ron Pereira - August 13th, 2008

There are at least two schools of thought related to the use of software when drawing value stream maps. Some lean purists claim the use of value stream mapping software is heretical while others have no problem with it. My Opinion My

Must Read Article about Top Toyota Engineer

By Ron Pereira - August 5th, 2008

If you don’t already read Jon Miller’s excellent blog you’ll want to pay a visit and read his most recent article “Toyota’s Top Engineer on How to Develop Thinking People.” The original article Jon r

Laundry Kaizen

By Ron Pereira - August 2nd, 2008

With my wife trying to focus on our newest family member I decided to do the laundry this past week. It’s been awhile since I’ve done the laundry and some things have definitely changed. Before Kaizen Before, what I’m calling

Planting Seeds

By Ron Pereira - July 13th, 2008

What can we learn about continuous improvement from the person Christian’s call the King of King’s, Lord of Lord’s, and The Great I AM? Lots. Let’s start in the book of Matthew. And he spoke to them at length in parable

Ban the Stop Watch!

By Ron Pereira - June 30th, 2008

Allow me to introduce Joe, the plant Industrial Engineer. Joe is a nice boy fresh out of college. On this particular day old Joe comes popping out of his cubicle in his Dockers and white polo shirt holding a clip board and stop watch.

The Spiritual Side of Continuous Improvement

By Ron Pereira - June 26th, 2008

I’m exhausted – both physically and mentally. For the past 5 days I’ve been involved in an extremely intense kaizen. One could even call it a kaikaku – or radical change event. I’ve coached, learned, cleaned, painted, and swe

What is Value?

By Ron Pereira - June 20th, 2008

“Above all, lean practitioners must be relentlessly focused on the customer when specifying and creating value.” -Womack & Jones, Lean Thinking I love Seth Godin’s blog. He has written some amazing posts over the year

Strategies to Sustain Operations Excellence

By Ron Pereira - June 9th, 2008

This is an abridged version of a presentation I recently gave at a manufacturing excellence conference. If you’d like to download the video follow this link to Google Video and click on download video.

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