Novayama LLC

What are YOUR unseen managerial routines?

One of the questions Mike Rother was trying to answer with his research that became Toyota Kata was: “What are the unseen managerial routines that lie behind Toyota’s success with continuous improvement and adaption?” And to summarize (in my own words), what he found was: 1. A pattern for problem-solving and thinking that is taught …

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Standards Capture Your Knowledge

I live on an arterial street about half a mile (800 meters) from Everett Fire Department Station 5, so it isn’t unusual to hear emergency vehicles go by. Last evening, though, we heard a LOT of them, coming from not just Station 5, but elsewhere. Time to turn on the scanner. “Fire, Residential, Confirmed” about …

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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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