Gemba Academy

100th Post!

By Ron Pereira - May 1st, 2007

Tonight was my 100th post since starting LSS Academy in January of this year. So as I sip on some cheap Sutter Home White Zinfandel wine (California 2003) and reflect on the past few months I would just like to say thanks to all of you

Dumbing Down Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - April 30th, 2007

I recently came across an interesting article written by Mark Kiemele, co-founder and president of Air Academy Associates. In the article Mr. Kiemele discusses how Six Sigma could die a slow death or remain around for many years to com

We Are Now Shipping Taiichi Ohno’s Workplace Management

By Jon Miller - April 30th, 2007

Sweet relief, the books have arrived. Thanks for your patience. We’ve set up a flow line to pack and ship, paced at about 90 seconds per order. Now don’t everybody order at once. We value heijunka around here.

Seek the Simple Solution from Many People

By Jon Miller - April 29th, 2007

There is an apparent conflict between two of the ten commandments of improvement that has been bothering me for a while. It is the kind of problem that goes away as soon as you stop thinking about it. But I think it may represent somet

The Exceptional Presenter

By Ron Pereira - April 29th, 2007

(Written this past Friday) Hello from 28,000 feet up in the air. I am flying back home after an awesome week of training a room full of Six Sigma students. I got to the airport a little early and ended up staring down a book shelf in o

Wisconsin Continues to Lead in Lean Government

By Jon Miller - April 28th, 2007

We’ve written before about the support by the State of Wisconsin for Lean manufacturing efforts for companies in that state, as well as efforts to bring Lean practices into government itself. Lean manufacturing support by governm

Bad Management

By Ron Pereira - April 27th, 2007

After submitting my post last night I wondered if my overly optimistic attitude was unrealistic. Only one person has commented on the post and this person seemed to think I was off my rocker a bit. I also got to thinking of the recent

How to Use a Kaizen Newspaper

By Jon Miller - April 26th, 2007

Chris asked: Are there rules for what goes on a kaizen newspaper so it does not become a massive action item list? A “massive action item list” should be cause for celebration. A full kaizen newspaper is a good thing. The f

Complainers Wear Me Out

By Ron Pereira - April 26th, 2007

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people constantly complain about how management or some authoritative body (i.e. government official, church leader, etc.) is doing them wrong. These people, you likely know a few, usually complain

Lean Sourcing: The Top Three

By Jon Miller - April 25th, 2007

We’re writing today as part of a score of bloggers on the topic of The Top Three issues in sourcing. Here’s is our Top Three: 3. Slow is the New Fast When faced with the hard way and the easy way, always take the hard way. This is

Graphs 101 – By Seth Godin

By Ron Pereira - April 25th, 2007

My good friend Seth Godin, OK so he doesn’t know I exist but I digress, recently took note of his Google History data. He said the data shows he does a lot more searching on Tuesday. He went on to say that this was completely coi

Narrowing the list with n/3

By Ron Pereira - April 25th, 2007

Rob over at 63 Buckets recently had an excellent post where he discussed the nominal group technique. This brought to mind a neat trick that can be used to help a team take a large list of ideas and scope them down into a more manageab

Neural Linguistic Programming

By Ron Pereira - April 24th, 2007

An interesting field of study I have briefly researched (i.e. read a few books but no formal training) is Neural Linguistics Programming (NLP). I am by no means an expert in NLP and am not promoting it here. There are parts of NLP th

Theme Blogging Week: Lean Sourcing

By Jon Miller - April 24th, 2007

The Sourcing Innovation blog has organized a group of fellow bloggers in a series of posts on the topic of sourcing over the next week. Each of our 20 or so blogs will raise their Top Three issues in sourcing. What can a kaizen blog of

Building Quality Into the Teaching of Medicine

By Jon Miller - April 23rd, 2007

Jidoka applied to medical education. What a day. The University of Kentucky News announced that they are Applying Lean Manufacturing to Medical Education. The article Lessons from Industry: One School’s Transformation Towards

Lean Landscaping

By Ron Pereira - April 23rd, 2007

Some people say mixing Lean and Six Sigma with your home life is wrong. I couldn’t disagree more. I mean come on… are we supposed to just stop trying to make things better after leaving the plant? That makes no sense to me a

Sheryl Speaks about Toilet Paper

By Ron Pereira - April 23rd, 2007

This article about toilet paper conservation, yes you read that right, has nothing to do with Lean or Six Sigma… but I just had to share. Comments?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By Ron Pereira - April 22nd, 2007

My wife and I have been blessed with 3 kid’s ages 4, 2, and 8 months. One of things we have always done is read to them – a lot. We read to them before bed and many times before naps. Today, before naps my 4 year old asked me

Binary Logistic Regression

By Ron Pereira - April 21st, 2007

Yikes… this title sounds serious, eh? No worries… we can get though it. We use linear regression when we have variable Y data (output) and variable X data (input) and we want to know if there is correlation between them. We

Ten Reasons Why One Piece Flow Will Not Work

By Jon Miller - April 21st, 2007

Rather than insisting that one piece flow will work, we like to ask people why one piece flow will not work for them. Here are some of the most common reasons we hear, and some ways we respond: 1. We can’t get needed materials in

TOC Bottleneck versus Lean Pacemaker – Part 2

By Ron Pereira - April 19th, 2007

Last night we discussed the main tenets of TOC. Tonight we will introduce the Lean Pacemaker showing how it may not always be the constraint in our system. This, my friends, is where the TOC and Lean proponents often “bow up̶

What Would You Do If You Had No __?

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2007

One my favorite phrases used by my Japanese teachers’ was “__ ga nakattara dosuru?” or “What would you do if you had no__?” When I heard this I knew we were in for some fun – of watching someone stretch their mind. R

TOC Bottleneck versus Lean Pacemaker – Part 1

By Ron Pereira - April 18th, 2007

Tonight I am starting a 2 part series contrasting the Theory of Constraints with Lean Manufacturing. Specifically, I want to discuss the differences between a TOC “bottleneck” and a Lean Manufacturing “pacemaker.” I have seen T

The Best Visual Control in the World

By Jon Miller - April 17th, 2007

Day two of kaizen instruction on the shop floor, I came across the best visual control in the world. All of these years it’s been right in front of me. It’s the change in the human face known as the smile. The people that I

Taguchi Index – Cpm

By Ron Pereira - April 16th, 2007

Last night we discussed the Taguchi Loss Function and how Taguchi methods are more concerned with hitting the target compared to more traditional methods that often focus on keeping our data between the upper and lower specification li

Gemba Academy Blog

Blog Archive