Note – this post was written pretty much simultaneously with a post on the lean.org forum. Mike Rother has put up a compelling presentation that highlights a long-standing misunderstanding about the purpose of “standards.” Some time ago, a (well-meaning) author or consultant constructed a graphic that shows the PDCA wheel rolling up the incline of [...]
“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 [...]
Boeing’s “PTQ” (Put Together Quickly) videos show a time lapse of an airliner in production. They have been producing the for years – certainly since I was working there. This one, though, shows something a little special. When I first started working there, the idea of a line stop was unthinkable. The plane moved on [...]
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 [...]
Hopefully that title got some attention. In Toyota Kata, Mike Rother frames a PDCA coaching process around five questions. The first three questions are: What is the target condition? What is the current condition? What problems or obstacles are preventing you from reaching the target? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could build a machine [...]
I suppose, at some level, that makes emotional sense. After all, the idea is to keep production moving. But the logical follow-on question is: “OK, so if the team member encounters aproblem that is going to force her to work around things, to do the work in a way that wasn’t planned, what do you [...]
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 [...]
Bryan Zeigler has a great post on his “ Lean is Good” blog site. Titled “ Andon Calls and Muri,” he describes Toyota’s phenomenal capacity for responding to problems, and then takes us back to where the rest of us are with some really great questions: If it is physically impossible to answer every andon call [...]
We were down on the shop floor watching an assembly operation. The takt time was on the order of three hours. The assembler was new to the task, and the team leader periodically came by and asked if he was “doing OK.” The reply was always in the affirmative. As the takt time wound down [...]