Tweddle Continuous Improvement

"The foundation for transparent thinking is the elimination of a blaming and shaming culture"

I agree - it is a must read

Cool video!

The scene from the movie is funny and the article has some great questions.

And I love the Monty Python metaphor. That gives me the idea to use the black knight scene in the next team meeting to demonstrate how once your future state becomes current state a new future state must be identified and targeted. "None shall pass!"

The lesson: waste doesn't get eliminated until someone asks why is it there!

Great story...

One piece flow for Continuous Improvement - How often are we improving?

Constantly!

Does this cause us to re-think the way we do Kaizen?

Where is the gap? Creating a persistent continuous improvement mentality rather than a Kaizen "event" mentality?

I think that is what he is trying to communicate. However, I believe that there is room for both approaches.

In business, we tend to assume that crisis will either not occur, or when it does will be within our domain of being able to handle it… but we get surprised and our problem solving skills are stretched to the breaking point. Why? Because we have never really practiced those skills, and if we have, we have not been critical enough of how we went about solving routine problems, and we are sloppy.

Toyota has an average 14 mistake-proofing devices at EVERY workstation. You should, too! Go ahead and take away the opportunity to make a judgment error, an identification error, an entry error - the list goes on forever.

Even marketing folks use visual management boards!

Just a good, basic article on zero defects

Zero defects is a philosophy of Lean. It simply means that every process should be designed so that it is impossible to produce poor quality. The underlying premise, which is true in nearly every case, is that the cost of preventing problems is lower than the cost of fixing them.

Perhaps a little hard to tell, but there's an identical air conditioning unit in every single little office. Hundreds of them (it's a large building). I saw similar examples with large apartment buildings. Is central air a waste? Sure there's some production efficiency in large-scale utilities - wait did I just say that? But how much of that efficiency is wasted when it is delivered to areas that don't necessarily need it. Would smaller units that can be easily turned off create greater aggregate system efficiency? Aggregate "actual in use" efficiency vs. the "large scale production efficiency"? It's the same issue that electric cars and makers of single-home power plants (solar, geo, etc) are wrestling with.

I don't know about this one.

Our target condition is a stable process with reduced, more consistent cycle times as less time is spent hunting for things. Though we may see a correlation between 5S audit scores and stability, it is all to easy to focus on the score and forget the reason.

Gotta love Ohno quotes! I think I'm going to have to get this book. Wakamatsu then shared this response from Taiichi Ohno: This answer infuriated Taiichi Ohno. "I learned how to figure out 8 x 2 = 16 in elementary school. I had never thought I would learn that again from you when I am this old. Do not treat me like a fool"

If our process is perfect today, and everyone continues their job, waste will still increase. Why? There are perhaps many reasons, but none more undeniable than the fact that conditions change. Data changes, regulation changes, customer expectations change, and of course even the people in the organization change. Every one of these changes affects the conditions under which our process was designed for perfection.

Tips for Continuous Improvement

Where could we try this? It sounds like a great technique.

We've been attempting to do this with our daily huddle's in POD & Pressroom. I'm going to put this article in front of the innovation team today and see what we can get going. This technique can be used in any of our production teams and perhaps if we put scheduling & production together for a bit we could build some trust between the two.

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It's built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

As you all know, a horizontal surface can become a potential area for items to accumulate. When it comes to workbenches, it seems that they have far too many things on them and are much bigger than the need to be.