This presentation will highlight the most common mistakes companies make when copying Toyota's methods to problem solving. Rather than understanding the principles and what drives those principles, organizations are copying the Toyota tools and adjusting their results to resemble a lean implementation. This situation presents frequent mistakes to include focusing attention to the tool and how to use it, rather than discovering the reasons that caused Toyota to create that tool in the first place. Moreover, reviewing crucial steps to understanding a problem and its causes are usually replaced by the highly anticipated steps of implementing countermeasures, so there is something visible to show.

The key concepts of Genchi-genbutsu (real place, real stuff), is traditionally misunderstood by superficial data collection. Samuel will share pictorial examples of root cause analysis and how this technique can make a difference in how you solve problems from now on.

Speaker Bio: Samuel Obara

Samuel Obara has implemented the Toyota Production System (TPS) at Toyota facilities in Japan, Brazil, USA and Venezuela. In almost 30 years of TPS experience, he has helped over 350 companies in diverse environments ranging from schools, to government agencies, to bio-tech to banks and in a variety of countries, including China, Mexico, Canada, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Austria, Africa, the U.K., and the U.S.

Samuel is a faculty member with the Lean Institute Brazil, USA and Mexico and an instructor of Lean Enterprise for the San Diego State University. He is a guest lecturer on Lean for post-graduate classes at Stanford University and has been a speaker at conferences sponsored by the American Society for Quality (ASQ), Shingo Prize, AME, Lean Enterprise Institute. He has been featured in Lean publications such as the Assembly Magazine in the USA and Pharmaceutical Insider in Mexico.