Gemba Academy

Toyota to Reduce Span of Control in Engineering

By Jon Miller - June 14th, 2010

The Nikkei reported on June 11, 2010 that Toyota is bringing back front line supervisors, adding a layer of management to staff positions that has been missing since 1989. This is an admission by Toyota, the world’s greatest lean

Your Homework This Week

By Ron Pereira - June 14th, 2010

I just read an excellent post by Jamie Flinchbaugh titled A Call to Action. The basic premise of Jamie’s thoughts are to stop talking about things… instead take action. So, your homework for this week is two-fold. Read Ja

An Up Close Look at a Toyota Assembly Line

By Jon Miller - June 10th, 2010

There is a series of six videos on the Toyota Europe website titled “Your Toyota is My Toyota”. Team members from the Burnaston, UK factory explain their roles in building quality in to Toyota vehicles. Individuals from the

How to Radically Increase Personal Productivity

By Ron Pereira - June 9th, 2010

Think back to the last meeting you attended. How many people were there? How long was the meeting? Let’s assume – for sake of example – that there were 8 people in your meeting. Let’s also assume the meeting lasted 1 hour. This

21 Questions to Ask When Walking the Model Line, Part 2

By Jon Miller - June 9th, 2010

Continuing our walk on the model line, here are questions 11 through 21 to ask when performing a lean maturity audit: 11. What methods are used to smooth out the variation in workload due to changes in product mix or work volume? What

21 Questions to Ask When Walking the Model Line, Part 1

By Jon Miller - June 8th, 2010

The model line is a value stream or a section of a value stream used as a pilot to demonstrate an organization’s capability to deploy lean systems and behaviors. The model line approach is used early in an organizations lean jour

Leaders Who Think Across Silos

By Jon Miller - June 5th, 2010

A Newsweek article titled ‘Know What You Don’t Know’ interviews Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and plumbs his insights into the futre of leadership. One passage caught my eye in paticular: You came out of law school

Jim Joyce and Accountability

By Ron Pereira - June 4th, 2010

As those that follow Major League Baseball know, umpire Jim Joyce cost pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game earlier this week. For those that don’t know the story, Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga needed one more out in or

Good Fortune Deceives, but Bad Fortune Enlightens

By Jon Miller - June 3rd, 2010

Previously we made an analogy between King Pyrrhus and Toyota’s cost of victory in the battle for sales volume. I recommend the Classics once again as a source of wisdom for leaders. In the most challenging of times they could be

Enhancing Total Management Commitment

By Jon Miller - June 2nd, 2010

In an e-mail, Junaid asked: How we will enhance top management commitment and involvement for implementation of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)? This is a great general question to ask for any effort to establish excellence, maintai

3 Practical Ways to Immediately Reduce Costs

By Ron Pereira - June 1st, 2010

No matter if business is good or bad one thing is for certain… you, and those you work with, should be laser focused on cost reduction. Now be honest, when you read the words cost reduction was the first thing that popped into your m

Fake Lean and the Spotting Thereof

By Jon Miller - May 31st, 2010

If the peddlers of fake lean were as easy to spot as antler salesmen we would have a much easier time staying free of them. I’ve seen some great deals on antlers, and like the emperor’s clothes, the many leaders who have pa

The Fine Print About Lean Transformations

By Jon Miller - May 27th, 2010

Here’s the deal. If you call between now and July 1, 2012 we will guarantee a full 5X return on investment for a lean transformation! Benefit now and pay in 24 easy monthly installments. No capital investment is required. Ready t

The Original Kamishibai

By Jon Miller - May 25th, 2010

By pure chance I came across a book on display at the local public library titled Manga Kamishibai: The Art of the Japanese Paper Theater by Eric P Nash. It is a history of the paper theater art form from the 1930s to modern times. The

Review of Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream

By Jon Miller - May 24th, 2010

Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream: Rethinking Your Supply Chain and Logistics to Create Maximum Value at Minimum Cost by Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe is the latest publication from the Lean Enterprise Institute. The book gui

Toyota Partnering with Tesla

By Jon Miller - May 22nd, 2010

There’s new hope in Fremont, California with news of the likely resurrection of NUMMI, the recently closed GM-Toyota joint venture automobile factory: Tesla’s announcement Thursday that it was teaming up with Toyota to star

How to Set Span of Control for Leaders

By Jon Miller - May 21st, 2010

Earlier in the week Jamie Flinchbaugh started a great conversatoin when he asked “what is the right span of control for a manager?” Jamie defined span as: “…how broad an individual managers responsibility is def

The Most Important Aspect of Kaizen

By Ron Pereira - May 20th, 2010

I recently facilitated a SMED kaizen event. Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to facilitate events all over the world. But this event was different. Very different. You see this kaizen event was in France and short of two tea

The Most Important Muda Walk

By Ron Pereira - May 19th, 2010

We lean advocates often talk about going to gemba, or the place the work is done, in order to see what is actually happening. We also refer to the process of walking in order to seek out waste as going on a muda walk. Muda, for those t

Where Old Dogmas Go to Die

By Jon Miller - May 16th, 2010

The death of dogma is the birth of morality. That’s a bit of winning 18th century philosophy from Immanuel “Never Say” Kant. Morality is the knowing of right from wrong at the level of truth. Dogma is personal opinion

3 Tips for Continuous Improvement Success

By Ron Pereira - May 10th, 2010

I recently wrote about the Long and Winding Road of P90X and Continuous Improvement. In this article I want to share some ideas for how to approach things such as workout programs and continuous improvement as they are surprisingly sim

Never Start with 5S!

By Jon Miller - May 4th, 2010

“Oh no,” some of you are thinking. “Too late! Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” Jamie Flinchbaugh started a thought-provoking discussion today on his blog where he says don’t do 5S and gives good reas

The Long and Winding Road

By Ron Pereira - May 3rd, 2010

As I come up on the 90th day of my P90X workout program I can’t help but compare the situation to the continuous improvement journey. You see, by definition, the P90X program is meant to get you into top shape within 90 days. And, le

The Will, the Willow and the Frog

By Jon Miller - May 2nd, 2010

Change is like the boughs of the willow in a breeze. We can seldom control more than the very leaves and tips of branches, never the whole tree itself. When faced with absolutely solvable problems going unaddressed or imaginable future

An Infinite Number of Solutions…

By Jon Miller - April 30th, 2010

…may seem like a good thing. After all, the more solutions we have to any particular problem, the more likely we are to solve it right? In actual practice when we are properly constrained we are more likely to spend our time and

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