Michael Ballé reflects on what it really means to "make people before parts" and introduces two more lean terms that just so happen to be Japanese.
What? More Japanese terms? Aren’t kaizen and gemba and so on enough already? Time and time again, people ask me an easy way to Lean. They want something different, but not too different, just as people fancy innovation but can’t stand innovators. They want a roadmap, a plan that fits what they already know without having to explore barbarous terms and concepts. I should know, I was the same. Twenty years ago I first studied how Toyota engineers helped one of their suppliers with a headlight cell. The Toyota engineers wanted to increase the number of change-overs to reduce the batch size, the supplier engineers couldn’t mobilize the change-over specialists to devote so much time to just one cell. The Toyota engineers wanted to pull on the cell every couple of hours, the supplier engineers didn’t want to devote the manpower to pick up parts so often. The Toyota engineers wanted to train the operators, the supplier engineers… you get the picture.
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Marielvi Piñero