Here is the sixth, and probably final, installment of my tales from the NUMMI tour. You can revisit them by starting with Tale #1 and continuing on from there. One more important reminder from the NUMMI visit reinforced something I’d…
NUMMI Tour Tale #4: The Pull Gift Shop While the NUMMI plant would score very highly on almost any measure of visual management, you could still see on a tour that it wasn’t 100% perfect in its 5S compliance. In…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator?NUMMI Tour Tale #2: The Power of Reynolds WrapNUMMI Tour Tale #3: The Power of Why Back to stories about my tour of the Toyota/GM plant in Fremont CA. The NUMMI lobby has…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator?NUMMI Tour Tale #2: The Power of Reynolds Wrap I think, by now, that Toyota is pretty famous for its “5 Whys” approach for root cause problem solving. Asking why five times, in…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator? The NUMMI tour guide told an interesting kaizen story as we went past the body weld area. Car bodies are held and transported on metal carrier racks that recirculate through the welding…
I really enjoyed my tour of the NUMMI plant last Friday. I’ll post my summary thoughts and impressions from the tour, but I wanted to post a few of the more interesting stories first. In a back part of the…
Milpitas Post – Local I saw the plant on Friday, it was pretty cool. Some excerpts from my visit notes are below, I should be posting the whole thing soon: Before entering the Gemba, you walk past a “Simulated Work…
I’m getting a chance to tour the NUMMI plant in Fremont CA, the joint venture between Toyota and General Motors. I’m very excited about it and will post some thoughts over the weekend. Anybody already been there and have perspectives…
The Globe and Mail: In the boardroom at the General Motors Oshawa plant is a baseball bat. Two words are carved on it: Beat Toyota (only first page available): Interesting quote: “‘We’re not landing a man on the moon any…
Curious Cat Management Improvement The Deming-focused blog, Curious Cat, has comments on an earlier article I posted about Toyota and GM. Please check out my main blog page at www.leanblog.org The RSS feed content you are reading is copyrighted by…
Detroit News: A quote from GM’s VP of Sales, Service, and Marketing, Mark LaNeve: “‘The chapter is over,’ he told me, acknowledging the obvious: Toyota, Honda and Nissan combined sell more vehicles to American consumers than GM does. ‘Japan Inc.…
Detroit News – 04/07/05 Well this is predictable. GM is in the news with profit problems and management shakeups. So what comes next? Let’s beat up on the suppliers and pressure them into China. When GM wants “aggressive cost cutting”…
