Tag: Japan Tour

As I blogged about this morning, don't forget that you can get a FREE Kindle copy of Practicing Lean today (January 21, 2020). As I...

Typically, the customer (or supplier) icon in classic Lean "Value Stream Mapping" looks like a factory. Well, it looks like what might appear to be...

Monday was the first day of my fifth Lean study trip to Japan. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to once again visit a Toyota...

This is an interesting article: Inside Toyota's Takaoka #2 Line: The Most Flexible Line In The World I had a chance to visit the 'Takaoka #1"...

When I had the chance to go back to Japan last October with Honsha, there was a big focus on what the former Toyota...

I had a great time and learned so much as a guest of Honsha and their Executive Development Mission trip to Japan in October....

When I got back from Japan a few weeks back, somebody at a hospital client of mine asked me: "Why go back to Japan again? Haven't you been there, done that?" Why go back to Japan? Why not go back? I learn something new and have great experiences each time and my recent opportunity to tag along with Honsha was no exception.

Last week, I wrote Part 1 of this piece about TQM and "Small Kaizen" at a Japanese Hospital pharmacy. The hospital was happy that employees were participating in their "Small Kaizen" process, but there was a month in which they saw the number of submitted Kaizens drop, from about 138 to 58 or so. As I write about in Measures of Success, two data points usually don't make a trend.

I'm overdue in writing more about my last trip to Japan a few months back. Today, I'll like to share some highlights from one organization we visited, Seki Chuo Hospital, which is located outside of Nagoya. I have visited this hospital in 2012 and 2014 and it's interesting to see how their approach to Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, and Kaizen has progressed and evolved. I mentioned them in a 2014 post about "quality circles."

Monday, I blogged about the sushi-making class I took on my last Sunday in Japan. Later that same Sunday, I did a walking food tour in the Shibuya area. Walking food tours are a great way to explore and learn about a city. In our small group, there was a couple from Australia and a retired couple from South Africa. Between stops on the tour, the South African gentleman, a retired mining company manager or executive, asked me why I was there in Japan for work.

Last week, I got back from my third trip to Japan and we visited three hospitals, Toyota, another manufacturer, and heard from a cafeteria services company leader about their Lean and continuous improvement journeys. As I've blogged about before, some of these organizations have been practicing TQM for 30 years and are adding elements of Lean methods on top of that foundation. I'm hardly an expert on Japan. I still feel like I view the country with fresh eyes. Standards and Standardized Work... at Work During this trip, I heard a number of people talk about the cultural imperative about following rules and laws. In the workplace, we might call these rules "standardized work"...

It's Monday morning in Nagoya, Japan as I write this. I'm still jet-lagged and up early, so here's a blog post after all... Sunday, I had the chance to visit the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya. There's so much that I can blog about...I'll write more posts about my museum visit in the future. In this post though, I share a little bit about some of the books that they sell - in English and Japanese...