January 2008 will mark 10 years Gemba Research has been in business. This blog has been active for just over four years now. We are reflecting on the past 10 years in an effort to renew our purpose and focus our energies. We will do the same for the purpose of this blog. We will continue to promote Gemba, practical kaizen and applied lean thinking but how we do this may change as we better define our purpose.

As part of this effort to disseminate tools and thinking for practical kaizen, starting in 2008 we will run a series on 101 Kaizen Templates and how to use them. That gives us a takt time of 3.61 days so check back often. We will introduce a template, explain what it is and why to use it, and show an example of how to fill it out. Are there 101 kaizen templates? We don't know. I was able to list 36 in about 2 minutes before I ran out of fingers. There may be more or less, in which case we will add some of our own inventions.

What is a kaizen template? For the purpose of this series we will limit it to some sort of document or visual representation that is used to do kaizen. These include spaghetti diagrams, time observation sheets, standard(ized) work combination sheets, A3 reports and many others. Please feel free to make nominations or requests and we will accommodate as much as possible.

With each entry we will also provide a templates for download, such as we have done with the highly popular and useful skill matrix. Where applicable we may get fancy and explore other technologies such as video to demonstrate the use of kaizen templates. Readers have been kind enough to request that some of the posts in this blog be collected and distributed as e-books, and this is something we will work towards for the 101 kaizen templates as well as possibly other popular content.

Thank you for reading, and best wishes to everyone in the New Year.