Kaizen Through Growing Your People

As mentioned in my last post, continuous improvement (kaizen) is done through people, ideally close to the shop floor. You should always look for people to develop and grow, as they in turn nurture your continuous improvement. While it is really hard to give specific recommendations that apply to everybody, let me muse a bit on the topic.

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Who Does Kaizen?

One core aspect of lean manufacturing is continuous improvement, or kaizen in Japanese. This concept emphasizes ongoing, incremental enhancements to processes, products, and services. Yet, there are commonly differences between how Toyota does kaizen and how the rest of the world does kaizen. These mostly relate to who does most of the kaizen activities. In Western companies, kaizen is usually driven by management. At Toyota, most of the improvement originates from and is handled on the shop floor. Let me explain…

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What Exactly Is Overburden (Muri)?

Overburden (muri) is one of the three evils of manufacturing, along with unevenness (mura) and waste (muda). Out of the three, overburden is probably the least understood. Hence, in this post I will look deeper at overburden, including plenty of examples as well as the effects of overburden on your people.

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The Soft Power of the Toyota Production System—Yokoten, Nemawashi, and More

When we are talking about lean manufacturing, we often focus on the tools like kanban, 5S, SMED, and many more. Sometimes, but harder to grasp, is the underlying culture and philosophy of continuous improvement and PDCA. Part of this culture is what you could call the soft power of the Toyota Production System. This is a form of decision making in contrast with the “hard power” more common in Western companies. Let’s have a look:

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Making the Problem go Away Is NOT Improvement

Managing problems Businessman in a Mazeis an important part of manufacturing because it allows companies to identify and address issues that can impact product quality, production efficiency, and overall profitability. However, it is not to be confused with actual improvement. While taking care of the problem  (hopefully) makes the problem go away, actual kaizen requires that the problem should not come back.

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On the Team Structure at Toyota

Toyota is (among other things) famous for its team structure on the front line. They have a quite low ratio of team members to supervisors, and I believe that is part of their success. Whereas many Western companies overstuff their hierarchy, at Toyota supervisors actually have the time to help their people and to also improve the operations. Let me dig deeper into that. This blog post was inspired by the new book by Baudin and Netland, Introduction to Manufacturing.

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Adding Another Axis to the Qualification Matrix—Products

In my last two posts I talked about the qualification matrix, where you match the skills of your people to the skills needed for your business. This can be expanded with another axis, as for example the skills needed for certain products. This connects your people to your products through skills. It is also more useful for products where a single person assembles an entire product.

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