You can observe a lot just by watching. — Yogi Berra
A common topic of discussion in many companies is how to document and share what has been learned as they improve their processes. The most common approach is some kind of database (either online or on paper) that documents the various “best practices” solutions to various problems. They might, for example, show the before and [...]
“3P” is not a Toyota term. The workshop structure was taught by Shingijutsu and is now being propagated by people who learned it while working in their client companies. The most visible characteristic of 3P, the Production Preparation Process, is the idea of creating quick and dirty mock-ups of the product and the process. These [...]
Travel plans sometimes come together at the last minute. I went to the green company’s web site to rent a car, and got a message saying the site was down for maintenance. It said to please call the 800 number if I wanted to make a reservation. I called the number. The nice person on [...]
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to return and see my friends in the Netherlands, and I’d like to share some observations from the Lean Thinking in Healthcare Symposium I attended over there. But that conference was on Friday. I arrived in-country on Monday morning at 7:30am. By 10:30 am I was [...]
Michael Ballé’s recent Gemba Coach column drives home the importance of understanding that all of the so-called “tools of lean” are really there to drive problem solving. A well designed kanban system is (or at least should be) built to not simply provide a pull signal, but more importantly, to continuously ask, and answer: “What [...]
Tom sent this link to me, and I thought I would share it. I can’t say much for the correspondent, but this is a decent view of a modern automobile assembly line. The actual tour starts at around the 6:00 point. When I look at a production line, one of the key things I am [...]
I would like to thank everybody for a really engaging dialog in the previous two posts about 5S audits. Now I would like to dig in and look at what an “audit” is actually finding, and how we are responding to those issues. Our hypothetical production area is getting an audit. The checklist says things [...]
What is a few seconds of delay? Why is it such a big deal? Consider this example. While touring the Pilsner Urquell brewery in (surprise!) Pilsen, Czech Republic, we saw a lot of really good information boards, general organization, and a clear management commitment to continuous improvement. Their packaging plant produces 60,000 bottles of beer [...]
There was an interesting search in my logs today. [does a system have a single takt time or multiple] I always figure that if one person is looking, others are also curious, so let’s address it and maybe there will be a better search result for the next Googlenaut out there. Takt time is local. [...]
I was cleaning out some old stuff and came across a folded piece of paper with notes on it. They were from my parting comments to a kaizen event team that had put in a great week with spectacular results. They had started out wanting to improve the delivery of WIP to and from the [...]