Tim McMahon of the "A Lean Journey" blog (http://ALeanJourney.com), and Jeff Hajek of the Gotta Go Lean blog (http://www.GottaGoLean.com) offer several Lean tips to help speed up progress on your Lean Journey.
Put these simple Lean strategies to use, and supercharge your continuous improvement efforts.
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Management must go to the Gemba to practice Lean management. Gemba is roughly translated from the Japanese as the real place. The idea of the Gemba is simple: go to the place, look at the process, and talk with the people. Gemba walking teaches us to see in new ways what we have failed to see before. So what do you look for and how do you see it? All management should learn to ask these three simple questions: 1) What is the process? 2) How can you tell it is working? 3) What are you doing to improve it (if it is working)?
Problems (fires) can be avoided and the resulting fire fighting by trying these proactive steps:- Stop rewarding fire fighting and start recognizing fire preventing.- Create a corrective and preventative action process based on root cause analysis.- Put corrective action in place on the root cause of the problem- Conduct follow-ups on corrective and preventative actions to ensure effectiveness.- Share lessons learned from past opportunities so they are not repeated with another customer, order, project, etc.- Use a strategic planning tool like SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).- Use mistake proofing and standard work practices.- Implement “layered audits” (an ongoing chain of simple verification checks, which through observation, evaluation and conversations on the line, assure that key work steps are being performedproperly)