Short, self-contained answers to common questions on Lean, strategy deployment and AI in operations. Each links to the full explanation, and to an outside source where the definition is not ours.
A gemba walk is a leader going to the place where the work happens to watch it, ask questions and see waste first-hand before acting. Gemba is the Japanese word for the actual place where value is created. The point is direct observation, not a report or a dashboard. See the Lean Enterprise Institute definition or our guide.
Genchi genbutsu is a Toyota principle that means "go and see for yourself". Decision-makers observe conditions and talk to the people doing the work, instead of relying on secondhand reports or data alone. It is the idea behind the gemba walk. The Lean Enterprise Institute defines it, and our post explains why a spreadsheet can be accurate and still wrong about the floor.
A value stream map is a diagram of every step in the flow of material and information needed to take a product from order to delivery. It shows where work waits and which steps add no value. Drawn from memory it goes stale, and built from an event log it shows what actually ran, as in how Process Miner builds one. See the Lean Enterprise Institute overview.
The seven wastes, as listed by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno, are transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing and defects. Waiting is the one most teams miss, because it makes no noise. Our post Go and Look shows each one with an example and why people stop seeing them.
Toyota Kata is a way of teaching continuous improvement as a daily routine, described by Mike Rother in his 2009 book. The Improvement Kata has four parts: understand the direction, grasp the current condition, set the next target condition, and move toward it step by step. A Coaching Kata teaches managers to support the learner. Read our take.
Jidoka is one of the two pillars of the Toyota Production System, alongside just-in-time. It means a machine or a worker stops the work the moment something is wrong, so a defect is not passed to the next step. The andon cord is its best-known form on the line. See Toyota's description and how Toyota now predicts defects.
Hoshin Kanri is a Japanese method for deploying strategy. A small set of breakthrough goals is set at the top, then turned into aligned plans at every level through a two-way dialogue called catchball, with regular reviews. It is also called strategy deployment or policy deployment. See the Lean Enterprise Institute definition or our guide.
Catchball is the two-way conversation in Hoshin Kanri where goals and plans pass between leaders and teams, like a ball, until they are agreed and realistic. Leaders push targets down, and teams push back on resources, time and what is feasible. The aim is plans people believe in, not a one-way directive. Our post covers why catchball fails when people only nod.
Total cost of ownership is the full cost of an asset over its working life: the purchase price plus energy, maintenance, spare parts, downtime, changeovers, scrap and the labor spent keeping it running. For compressed air, a U.S. Department of Energy figure cited by Pumps & Systems puts power at nearly 88% of a compressor's ten-year cost. See The Smallest Number.
The hidden factory is the capacity a plant spends on work that adds no value: rework, scrap, re-inspection, waiting, firefighting and fixing mistakes. It rarely appears on a report as one line, so it goes unmanaged. The term is associated with quality pioneer Armand Feigenbaum, and the MESA blog explains it. We show one in Turnarounds With a Walk.
RPA replays a fixed sequence of steps the same way every time, so it suits known, rule-based tasks. Agentic AI handles the part that needs judgment, such as deciding which processes are worth automating or ranking the options. In practice an agentic AI step decides what to do and an RPA step does it. See Agentic AI vs RPA.
AI readiness is how well an operation can define a problem, supply trustworthy data for it, run the result inside real work and govern it afterwards. We rate six dimensions: Lean process maturity, data foundation, infrastructure, organizational readiness, use-case viability and governance. Read how to assess it or take the scorecard.
Score the step on judgment, risk, volume and exceptions. Our Judgment Lane Classifier then routes it to one of three lanes: deterministic software (rules, no model needed), an AI agent (real judgment applied narrowly, inside guardrails), or a human in the loop. It says so plainly when the answer is not AI.
In a draft-then-audit loop, one AI produces the output and a second, separate AI call grades it against a fixed rubric, sending it back for revision until it clears the bar. The result is a documented quality score and an audit trail for each recommendation, not just a polished draft. See Why an Independent AI Auditor Matters.
It is a Day 0 Hoshin Kanri call followed by five days on site, in which we map the value stream, read your own event log and watch the work happen. You get a prioritized view of which steps warrant deterministic automation, which warrant AI judgment, and which should stay with a person. See the agenda.
The free tools test your own numbers, and the five-day assessment runs the same questions on your real data. You can also get in touch.