Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results

Appendix 1 Where Do You Start with the Improvement Kata?

Ideally, every production process would have a target condition. Leaders would be able to check and mentor improvement activity by going from process to process daily, observing, and asking the five questions at each stop. Certainly no process in a production facility should operate without a defined standard that it is striving to achieve. However, it would be overwhelming and infeasible to begin by applying the improvement kata at many processes simultaneously.

One common answer to the question of where to start is at the loop in the value stream with the greatest potential for improvement. In the simplified value stream map in Figure A1-1, clearly the stamping loop, with its eight days ...