Visual Workplace Radio: Let The Workplace Speak

Where did the Kaizen Blitz originate? If you say Mother Toyota, you are only partly right. Tune in to Visual Workplace Radio this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, travels into history and tells you the real story behind when and how the so-called “blitz” (not its real name) arrived on our shores and what happened when it did. Do you know that the first kaizen blitz (not its name at the time) was held in 1986 at Jakes Brakes in Windsor Locks, Connecticut—and it almost closed that site down? Dazzling in reducing flow distance and flow time, that first event surfaced everything that was right with the blitz format—and everything that was wrong, very wrong, with it. And both that right and that wrong were perfect duplications of how Toyota conducted its own blitzes in Japan, with this one difference: never at Mother Toyota, the OEM. The blitz format was use for the supply chain only. Tune in. Learn the history that insiders know but don’t talk about.