- 10 Common Misconceptions About Lean Manufacturing
- Ten Reasons Why One Piece Flow Will Not Work
- The Best Visual Control in the World
- Give Me 60 Minutes and I'll Give You a Lean Transformation
- Toyota Owes Grandpa Ford
- Look Up from Your Work and Ask: ;Could We Flow This?
- Ouch! Change Hurts
- E-mail 5S
- The Top 5 Reasons for Using Production Preparation Process (3P)
- You've Gotta Go to Gemba More Often Than That!
- 5S Your Desk: And Other Tips for Office Productivity
- Skill Matrix Enables Suggestion System
- Work Content for Line Leads
- Strong Supervision: The Key to Long-term Kaizen
- The Four Elements for Sustaining Kaizen
- Keys to Sustaining 5S
- Top 10 Improvement Tools Named After Lean Sensei
- Intuition, Information and the Toyota Production System
- Nine Rules for Fighting Endless Meetings
Workplace Management Translation Update, January 2007I am about 84% through my first pass at translating Taiichi Ohno's book Gemba Keiei into what will become Workplace Management. This puts me just a bout a week behind plan. About halfway through I began clocking myself, and I was shocked to find that it is taking between 6 and 12 minutes per Japanese page. As Ohno said, the standard time should be the shortest time. Why the spread? I should look at the variables such as time of day, temperature, noise level, translating time elapsed, and blood caffeine level. Sounds like a six sigma project for someone. If I chose to make the time, I would do a fish bone diagram and an A3 on it, but that would keep me away from translation. Excuse? Yes. A kaizen topic for another day. There are also occasional debates with myself over the question of voice, or writing style that stop my fingers for a few minutes. Should a particular awkward sentences by Ohno be left awkward to get a better sense of the style of the man, or should I condense and polish it? You will have to read the book to find out how these debates turned out. Ohno's ideas are not difficult to understand. But he can be hard to translate. Some of his sentences take nearly half of a page, and you can see the stream of his thought developing as his words are being recorded. The ideas are important, the delivery is genuine and unpolished. The biggest influence on my translation speed is probably the "stare at the wall" factor so commonly cited in creative, or so-called knowledge work. I come across a particular word or phrase, think about the best way to put it into English, and think... as minutes pass by. In editorial news, there will be 38 chapters to the book instead of the 37 in the Japanese version or the 36 chapters that the previous English translation had. One of the chapters that did not make it into the previous version will be included, and chapter 36 from the Japanese version will be split in two. I will update the revised chapter titles, etc. soon. By Jon Miller - January 14, 2007 6:14 PM 
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At Nissan, 20+ years ago I heard about the 'san gen shugi' and found this 'realistic' approach very refreshing. Genba Kanri was their approach to Workshop Management. Good questions Steve. To be consistent, I suppose "kamban" would be a more accurate spelling to reflect how it is pronounced. In both "gemba" (vs. genba) and "kanban" (vs. kamban) it is a case of a standard being set through popular literature, right or wrong. In Japanese there is only one letter for the ending "n/m" and the default is "n" as in "kan" which is "to see" but when it is followed by a "b" then the phonetic qualities of the labial consonant affects the "n" and make it sound like "m". More than you wanted to know, perhaps. The difference between "kanri" and "keiei" is a more important issue. The easiest way to think of this is that "kanri" means "management" while "keiei" means "running a business". Used alone, "keiei" means to operate a business while "kanri" simply means to control or manage. People talk about their philosophy for keiei or (management philosophy or business philosophy) while they talk about methods or techniques for kanri. So although we say "hoshin kanri" for policy deployment/management or "medemiru kanri" for visual management or "ijo kanri" for abnormality management or "nichijo kanri" for daily management, "keiei" is never used in the sense of managing or controlling a defined process. A "keiei-sha" is a person who runs a business or has P&L responsibility and is more weighty while a "kanri-sha" would be a manager, person in charge, etc. though the latter is not such a common term to describe a manager. The title "Ohno Taiichi no Gemba Keiei" which is the Japanese title has a nuance similar to "Taiichi Ohno's Lessons on Shop Floor Leadership" in English. |
