Tag Taiichi Ohno

What We Learned from Touring Toyota’s San Antonio Plant

Last week was our first "Symposium on Learning Organizations" where we brought together 40 people with diverse backgrounds in manufacturing, healthcare, IT, government, and other industries or professions together to learn from each other in a "PowerPoint-free zone."

In this post, I'll share some photos and reflections on our tour of the Toyota truck plant in San Antonio (TMMTX). The visitor center has been completely revamped from my last visit, just as the one visitor center I saw in Japan back in March had been redone.

Major League Baseball Works on Standardizing the Ball… For What Purpose?

Back in 2014, I wrote an article for The Lean Post:

"Standardization is a Countermeasure, Never the Goal"
I'm a big fan of Taiichi Ohno's advice to "start from need." I cringe when I hear people say that we should standardize the way work is done "because Lean says so." There's no substitute for judgment in the grey areas related to standardized work.

What should we standardize? For what purpose? How standardized should the work be?

Baseball is struggling with questions like this... how standardized should the balls be... and for what purpose?

What Books on #Lean and TPS Are Sold at the Toyota Museum in Nagoya?

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...

How Toyota Gets Organizations Started with TPS

Last week, I mentioned it was the 25th anniversary of TSSC — formerly known as the Toyota Supplier Support Center (it’s now called the Toyota Production System Support Center). TSSC helped Children’s Health in Dallas learn how to reduce CLABSI…

My Webinar Recording: Standardize What Makes Sense…

Today at 3 PM, I'm doing a webinar at the invitation of the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council, as part of their "Quality Café" series. Thanks for the invitation!

It's open to the public and it's titled:

"Standardize What Makes Sense... Then Engage Everybody in Improving What You Standardized"

I hope you can join us...