Gemba Academy

Blog Action Day: Food and a Lean Culture Change

By Jon Miller - October 16th, 2011

We in the West waste nothing so prodigiously as food. One could argue time, but it’s hard to say what purpose time serves and whether it’s possible to know the way in which we spend it is wasteful or meaningful. That quickl

Success Made Humble

By Jon Miller - October 8th, 2011

The book Success Made Simple by Erik Wesner was mistitled. While it’s true there are many examples of great simplicity in the book, simple is hard. There is no Amish formula for business success per se. They are as much seeker an

Applying TPS Beyond the Shopfloor

By Ron Pereira - October 6th, 2011

Here’s a short, but very powerful, video of how lean thinking principles can make a massive impact on society. Well done Toyota! If you’re reading this via email or RSS you may need to click through to the site.

13 Questions to Assess Lean Competence in an Organization

By Jon Miller - October 5th, 2011

In a comment to an article about the four stages of competence, Mo asked: Can this model be introduced to organisation who have not heard of lean, it is pretty obvious they will be considered as stage one “Unconscious Incompetenc

U.S. Capitol Airport Namesake Rolls in Grave

By Jon Miller - October 3rd, 2011

Across all of my travels I have never encountered such an imbalance in supply and demand for airport taxis as at Reagan National last night. This is a bit shameful for an airport in the capitol of the world’s largest economy, the

Ambiguous Visual Controls: Airport Hotel Edition

By Jon Miller - September 30th, 2011

Airports are full of signs. Standing in queue gives ample time to reflect on their meaning and appreciate their ambiguity. This visual control at the check-in counter made me wonder why it was necessary to abandon the better part of va

The Last Step to 5 Whys Process – The “So What?” Test

By Ron Pereira - September 28th, 2011

The 5 Whys Process is an extremely powerful root cause analysis technique when applied properly. As we explained in our recent Gemba Glossary video focused on the 5 Why there are situations where asking why a few times will suffice whi

Gemba Glossary: The 5 Why

By Ron Pereira - September 20th, 2011

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

Snowflakes, Structural Collapse and the Simplification of Lean

By Jon Miller - September 19th, 2011

A snowflake is a delightfully complex object when rotated in the three spatial dimensions. Collapsed into two dimensions, it is a pattern of jagged lines. Reduced to a single dimension a snowflake becomes merely a connected series of p

With New Technology, Where Should We Go?

By Jon Miller - September 15th, 2011

According to a Wall Street Journal article from September 15, 2011, With New Technology, Start-Ups Go Lean start-ups are purportedly adopting a lean approach with the aid of new technology. However, this claim can be deceptive if we in

The Importance of Thinking About the Box

By Jon Miller - September 12th, 2011

Leaders interested in innovation or breakthrough improvement often speak of the importance of “thinking outside the box”. By this we mean discarding existing limitations on our thinking (the box) to generate new ideas, prod

Designing Better Hospitals with 3P: Video

By Jon Miller - September 11th, 2011

The Production Preparation Process (3P) is a method for bringing together a team to evaluate the requirements of a design, apply lean principles and use low-cost rapid prototyping (a.k.a. cardboard engineering) to achieve breakthrough

Applying 3P to Healthcare & Beyond

By Ron Pereira - September 7th, 2011

Gemba Academy’s 3P course (which stands for Production Preparation Process) demonstrates the application of this lean tool within the healthcare world. Although the course has a healthcare focus, the 3P principles taught apply to

Junaid’s Learning from a TPM Workshop

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2011

Our friend S.M. Junaid sends us occasional dispatches from his experiences with applying lean and kaizen at his company in Pakistan. Recently he shared his learning from a TPM workshop. An Operator’s Relationship to a Machine is

Lean Government Example: Defect Display Board

By Jon Miller - September 3rd, 2011

Here is a photo I took while on a hike through a state park with some family members one summer. Whether through an individual initiative by a park ranger or as part of a lean government initiative by Washington State, it is a great ex

Knowledge Workers Stand Up for a Healthier Workplace

By Jon Miller - September 2nd, 2011

The use of standing desks by knowledge workers is starting to go mainstream, according to an article by the Wall Street Journal titled Standing Desks Are on the Rise. Focusing mainly on Silicon Valley firms such as Google and Facebook,

Training Wheels

By Ron Pereira - August 30th, 2011

My son, who just turned 5 years old, recently taught me a valuable lesson. Like most young people my boy was itching to take the training wheels off his bicycle. We had told him that Daddy would take the training wheels off this weeke

Lean Kitchen – Fastcap Style

By Ron Pereira - August 24th, 2011

Here’s a great example of lean in action within a non-manufacturing situation! Oh, and for the record, my kids figured some of this stuff out months ago! 😉

Let’s all be friends and focus on making things better

By Ron Pereira - August 17th, 2011

I’ve sensed an unusually strong disturbance in the Continuous Improvement force the past month or so. It seemed to start with the announcement that iSixSigma was about to close their doors. Perhaps I’m partially to blame

The 6T of Daily Kaizen from a Cafeteria in China

By Jon Miller - August 16th, 2011

On the 7th floor of the building that houses our office in Shanghai, China there is a cafeteria. As I queued today a large green board caught my eye. There were 6 clip boards next to a poster extolling something called the “6T pr

Lean: A Life of Mistakes by Cynical, Unreasonable People

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2011

The more I try to get away from work by reading anything but books on kaizen, lean and continuous improvement, the more it seems I find examples of these anyway. An occupational hazard perhaps. Here are three important lessons from Iri

How to Stop Time

By Ron Pereira - August 8th, 2011

Note from Ron: This is a guest post from James Lawther. Enjoy! Here’s an interesting link for you. It shows the prices of some domestic appliances in the 1950’s. Sixty years ago you could buy: A Sylvania 17 inch black and wh

3 Things You Can Do When Your Manager Doesn’t Support Continuous Improvement

By Ron Pereira - August 2nd, 2011

We lean bloggers like to preach the importance of senior management support as it relates to continuous improvement. To be sure, having senior management support is extremely important and without it the hill to continuous improvement

Respect for Humanity, Now in 3D!

By Jon Miller - July 31st, 2011

Films in 3D have become briefly popular again recently. For someone who has been immersed in thinking about lean and the Toyota Production System, the term 3D is a call to arms for kaizen. Called 3K in Japanese, a workplace or job that

Ambiguous Visual Controls in the Park

By Jon Miller - July 29th, 2011

Walking through a park near Frankfurt, Germany I saw this sign. Checking first to make sure I had not slipped back in time to the 1880s, I snapped this photo. What does it mean? Not reading German, the only way this visual control coul

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