One of the factors common to organizations that maintain a continuous improvement culture is leadership alignment on an overall direction for improvement – a “True North” – that defines the perfection you are striving for. Steve Spear describes Toyota’s “Ideal” as: An activity or a system of activities is IDEAL if it always produces and [...]
As of about 12:30 Pacific 11/4 there have been a couple of revisions, so be sure to download the latest. Mike Rother has released Version 12.0 of the Toyota Kata handbook on his website. The handbook, over the last few iterations, has become much more pragmatic (and practical). The information about the coaching process is [...]
I have been noticing a significant linguistic difference between those who still embrace the “implement the tools” paradigm, and a much smaller (but growing) group are are adopting the PDCA thinking structure as a framework for everything else. It comes down to how a problem is stated. We were looking at an operation with a [...]
We had five sequential operations. Although the lowest repeatable times for each were well within the planned / target cycle time, there was a lot of variation. Though Operation 3 was working pretty continuously, Operations 4 and 5 (downstream) were getting starved on occasion, and the empty “bubble” was working its way to the output. [...]
While we lean practitioners seem to have earned a reputation of distain for high-speed automation, industries like mass production consumables, and the food and beverage industry, would not be viable without that approach. These plants are capital intensive, and the main focus of the people is to keep the equipment running. I hinted at some [...]
The team was driving toward a consistently executed changeover process as a target condition. In the last iteration, the process was disrupted by a scrapped first-run part. The initial level cause was an oversize bit in the NC router resulting in an out-of-spec trim and oversize holes. This occurred in spite of the fact that [...]
Mike Rother sent out an email today pointing out that the Lean Enterprise Institute’s web site now has a Toyota Kata page. I believe this is a significant event for the lean community as a whole, as well as for the LEI. As many of my regular readers know, I have maintained the view that [...]
A great insight from a client today. The target condition at this point is simply to establish some degree of transparency of the current condition on a status board without having to resort to probing questions to elicit what is working, and what is not. The observation was: “We’ll know we are succeeding when we [...]
Coincidently my experience this week ties in nicely to the last post. I have a couple of teams working to develop pull systems through their respective work areas. The conventional approach (I suppose) is a lot of PowerPoint about kanban, some exercises, developing a future state value stream map, then devising an implementation plan. An [...]
This post rambles a bit, and wraps up a few concepts. It was, however, inspired by a recent interview of Mike Rother on Lean Nation. (See below) One of the many good points that struck me was that you can’t rally around an ROI. Yet companies try to do just that. They set something ROI [...]
