- 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
- Lean Companies
- Agile Management Blog
- Curious Cat
- DailyKaizen
- Evolving Excellence
- Fashion-Incubator
- Got Boondoggle?
- Lean Blog
- Lean Insider
- Lean Builder
- Lean Reflections
- Lean Six Sigma Academy
- Learn Sigma
- Productivity Cafe
- Reforming Project Management
- Shmula
- The Lean Thinker
- Thinking for a Change
- TPM Log
5S Know How from the Last CenturyWe are going through a fairly thorough 5S exercise of our server. Just over 22GB of files were red tagged last week. Of the few items that were salvaged from the red tag folder was a series of notes by Brad Schmidt, President of Gemba Japan. These were from a Lean transformation engagement at a Midwestern aerospace company in 1999 that had its rough spots, if memory serves. Here is some 5S know how from Brad, rescued from the red tag bin: 5S Training Insist on giving people training about kaizen and the 7 types of wast before doing 5S with them. If 5S doesn't make sense to them, they will oppose it. Tops of Cabinets Always check on top of machines and cabinets. A whole bunch of stuff is up there. Nest of Vipers Wires, air hoses, and hydraulic lines on the floor make cleaning it hard. Get them off the floor. Think of these as a nest of vipers. Less Self-discipline Encourage people to do a good job on the first 4S so you don’t have to rely heavily on the 5th (self-discipline) which no one likes anyway. 5 Star Hotel Treat 5S in the workplace just like a 5 Star hotel idea. You don’t spit in a 5S hotel. Make Drawers Visual Put photos of what’s in the drawer, so you don’t have to open it to find out. Great stuff. Yet the last one troubles me. How would we ever put photos of what's in our server, on our server? There are tens of thousands of files in there, and they all look like this:
Thanks Brad, for writing down these 5S lessons you learned in 1999, before Lean manufacturing was a required phrase in every publicly company's annual report, when the New Economy was the big idea, and when Toyota was just a foreign car company trailing behind Ford and General Motors in sales, hardly worthy of study by Midwestern aerospace companies. By Jon Miller - August 13, 2007 10:10 PM |
Comments
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I don't get it. In 1999, Toyota wasn't "just a foreign car company." They were being emulated (or copied) by many different industries by that point. The resistance to all things Toyota was pretty fierce in 1999 within the US industrial heartland. Lean, TOC, Six Sigma, DFT and TPS were seen more or less on the same level by many of our clients. That's changed quite a bit over the last few years with Toyota rising to number one, but this misconception remains. "Just a foreign car company" is a caricature of the views of a difficult client, not mine. Actually I am looking for a standard routine for cleaning up servers, especially shared diskspace. Maybe you have some clues for us? Jan--- Put capacity quotas on network storage, so far thats the best I have come up with that forces users to keep it clean... until they just start saving important documents on there PC which will subsequently crash. -J Hi Jan - I just posted a blog entry in response to your question on cleaning up (5S-ing) servers. My company has done this a couple of times since I started here, and I hope that my insights are useful to you. Marcie, do you mean you just posted *to* a blog? The blog is the collection of posts, a single entry in it is a post. Thanks Eric. Change made to above - "a blog entry". |










