Donating Cash or Kaizen

The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a […]

Technology’s evolving role in supporting continuous improvement

Continuous improvement has always had a strained relationship with technology, for both good reasons and bad. One of the good is that doing things manually and building your own systems can be a one of the most productive means of learning you can create. One of the worst reasons is that because Toyota wasn’t using […]

Use Realistic Tolerancing and Poka-yoke for Process Control

An organization needed to ensure the safe delivery of their product in its own packaging. To control its process improvement regarding seal strength, they used tools like poka-yoke and realistic tolerancing. The company targeted to reduce the percentage of improperly sealed products. A simple experiment made it clear that a tight range of acceptable values […]