Posts Tagged ‘toyota’
Date: 08 Dec, 2010
Note: The following is part of a series written and delivered as a presentation to SMC Business Council’s Manufacturing Group on 05.13.2010. I am sharing it with our blog readers to stimulate a discussion. Feel free to weigh in and give me your comments. I’ll be posting it over the next few weeks to allow time for the discussion to evolve. A special thanks to Tom Henschke, newly appointed President at SMC for the opportunity to share the message. The Premise: Your Lean System Might Stink… In order to produce world-class results, lean or operational excellence must...
Current State: the problem with North American implementation of Lean (This is the fifth post in this series. If you’ve missed any of the previous posts, check them out by clicking on the “May” link at the right. We are thinking that there are some comments out there. Feel free to post your thoughts. We would love to hear from you!) I’ve given you an idea for where our current state problem began, but let’s look at how it is manifested in our own organizations today. The first thing we’ll look at is what a has become known in operational excellence circles as “event-a-holism”. ...
The Ideal Condition for Lean in North America The Ideal Condition for Lean in North America (This is the sixth part of this series on the condition of “lean” in North America. To see the other five parts, check them out in the Archive for this month and last (May). Thanks for the comments you’ve sent and the various tweets and comments on Facebook!) Do you recall the last major emergency your top level team tackled? I’m talking about an emergency that spanned the entire top level team and required each one of them to dig in to help. Let’s think about that and try...
Ideas for Good program at Toyota (http://www.toyota.com/ideas-for-good/) Is Toyota Applying the Suggestion System to Society? First, we know that Toyota’s principles are oriented to the good of society. In their own words: Toyota has sought harmony between people, society, and the global environment, as well as the sustainable development of society, through manufacturing. Since its foundation, Toyota has continuously worked to contribute to the sustainable development of society through provision of innovative and high-quality products and services that lead the times. http://www2.toyota.co.jp/en/vision/index.html ...
One of the most common “push backs” I encounter as an Operational Excellence coach is when we first introduce simple, individual, “five why” problem solving. I encourage my teams by telling them not to worry about solving problems; I tell them to just fill out problem solving sheets. Lots of them. Shortly, a top leader will take me aside and tell me that I really didn’t mean that…did I? Of course I did! Why would I want them to solve problems when the organization doesn’t have a simple, standard problem solving tool? How will we ever make quantum...
(This is the fourth installment from a speech given at SMC Business Councils a few weeks ago. You can see the previous installments by clicking this SMC Speech tag. The result will give you all the posts.) Around the time when Womack was publishing the first version of Lean Thinking, the seminal Toyota plant in North America, the one they built in Georgetown, Kentucky was celebrating its tenth anniversary. Some of its earliest leaders were moving on to different and new seasons and careers. Some of those early leaders went on to show organizations how to implement the Toyota Production System. ...
(This is the third installment from a speech given at SMC Business Councils a few weeks ago. You can see all the installments by clicking this SMC Speech tag. The result will give you all the posts.) Where would one look for the things that we need to do to eliminate waste? Well, because Womack’s system was presumably extracted from Toyota, one has to look at the source. In droves, we flocked to see what Toyota was doing. And we saw a lot, didn’t we? We saw cellular manufacturing, we saw the artifacts of pull systems – kanbans, we saw a pull cord that triggered a light and...
