Lean and Continuous Improvement
February 25, 2013 1 Comment
We often have people ask us about various Japanese terms that are used in lean manufacturing. Since lean production was simply a term used to describe the Toyota Production System back in the 1980’s, Japanese words are used to describe certain principles and concepts. We’ve created a cartoon video that talks about some of the Japanese Lean terms such as kaizen, kanban, heijunka, muda, mura, muri, andon, poka yoke, and others.
EMS Consulting Group is a management consulting firm designed to create value for manufacturers, service providers, and product developers. Our clients include organizations from the industrial and consumer products, defense/aerospace, healthcare, biotech, and medical device sectors. Providing lean manufacturing and lean six sigma training. lean healthcare training, and lean manufacturing consulting services; we can help you achieve lower costs, improved productivity and quality, and decreased time-to-market.
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Both Lean Manufacturers and TPS can be seen as a loosely connected set of potentially competing principles whose goal is cost reduction by the elimination of waste.[5] These principles include: Pull processing, Perfect first-time quality, Waste minimization, Continuous improvement, Flexibility, Building and maintaining a long term relationship with suppliers, Autonomation, Load leveling and Production flow and Visual control. The disconnected nature of some of these principles perhaps springs from the fact that the TPS has grown pragmatically since 1948 as it responded to the problems it saw within its own production facilities.