Novayama LLC

What is your “OK Zone?”

This photo says a lot about the organization. For those of you who might not come from an industrial background, the big red button on this podium is the E-Stop – the Emergency Stop button that shuts down EVERYTHING in the machine IMMEDIATELY. It is there in case someone is about to get hurt (or …

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Recovering a Failed ERP Implementation

I was working with this company mainly on their shop floor processes: Quality, Process Improvement, Daily Management – classic stuff. It was a medium sized plant (a few hundred people) that was part of a larger company with significant business footprints in Europe and North America. They hadn’t involved me in their upcoming ERP implementation. …

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The (Futile) Search for the Perfect Model

Many years ago I worked with a senior manager. He was very savvy about continuous improvement and TPS – he had been engaging in the space for many years before the word “lean” entered the lexicon. He understood it at a deep systems level, saw how all of the pieces interacted into a coherent whole, …

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Using the Coaching Kata Outside of the Improvement Kata

The client organization was working to incorporate the Toyota Kata mindset – scientific thinking / systematic problem solving – into their daily routines. This was early on in my journey as well, we were all learning. The company had a structure for how they wanted to go about it. My role was to advise, coach, …

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Project Management is Daily Management at Menlo Innovations

Last fall I got to spend another week hanging out with the awesome team at Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor. My last visit there was scheduled for early April 2020… but we probably all know what happened back then. I am saying all of that because I am going to use their project management system …

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