No business plan survives first contact with customers.
Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.
The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.
Kaizen means ongoing improvement involving everybody, without spending much money.
You can’t do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.
There are four purposes of improvement: easier, better, faster, and cheaper. These four goals appear in the order of priority.
All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing the time line by reducing the non-value adding wastes.
Without standards, there can be no improvement.
Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced.
When you are out observing on the gemba, do something to help them. If you do, people will come to expect that you can help them and will look forward to seeing you again on the gemba.