What is Gemba? Find out its importance in Lean

What does it mean to go to Gemba Lean? What is Gemba? Have you ever been to Gemba? If you have no idea of ​​the answer to these questions, keep reading this guide to answer your questions.

You are going to learn:

• What is Gemba?
• Go to Gemba Meaning
• Gemba Management
• What is House of Gemba?
• 5 golden rules of Gemba Management

What is Gemba?

Gemba is a word from Japanese that means "true place". When applied to manufacture, it means the place where things happen in the factory.

Used to indicate that people, whose work is production, are in a good place to make improvements in the process. That is, Gemba can be any workplace, it is where the action happens and facts can be found.

Go to Gemba Meaning

Go to Gemba means to go to the place where things truly happen. It is to understand that going to the factory is extremely important to understand the possible opportunities for improvement, since the people who are there deal with the processes that happen every day.

Managers often fail to make decisions because they ignore this important part of the production. They despise all the knowledge that can be gained by talking to those who see the process happen every day, who know the flaws and who may have ideas that will solve the problems.

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Gemba management

To implement a Gemba-centric approach, management must assume responsibility for quality, cost, and delivery. Thus gaining a competitive advantage.

There are some points that are important during the management of Gemba, and they are:

• Management should set goals for Gemba, with the management sector itself being primarily responsible for achieving them
• Generally, the needs of Gemba are better identified by the people who work in it
• A person involved should always be thinking about all sorts of problems and solutions
• Resistance to change decreases
• Continuous improvement becomes a possibility
• The proposed solutions become more real, having an approach that emphasizes common sense and low cost
• People begin to think and be inspired by the Kaizen at work as this philosophy becomes better understood, improving the efficiency of work
• Making changes does not always require senior management approval.

What is House of Gemba?

House of Gemba is a routine, there are two main activities in terms of resource management to ensure the achievement of quality, cost, and delivery (QCD):

• Maintenance: The established standards must be followed in order to maintain the planned performance status. That is, it is important to always be checking whether the procedures are being followed in the right way.
  
• Kaizen: Improvements must be carried out constantly in the established standards, being the three main activities of the Kaizen: Standardization, 5S, and Elimination of Muda (Waste) a thing that is also applied to Lean Manufacturing.

We can then, from these two activities and the management of Gemba, demonstrate visually how the management of the Gemba house should be done:

Through this house, the person responsible can easily see all the activities that must be done to make Gemba increasingly efficient and productive.

5 golden rules of gemba management

The first steps to achieving effective management are to understand and be close to Gemba. Since you understand that Gemba is the real place where everything happens and you should go to Gemba whenever you need to make improvements or solve problems, I will show you some golden rules that you should never forget:

1. When a problem arises, the first step to take is to go to Gemba
2. Check the Gembutsu ("relevant objectives" such as scrap, broken machines, returned goods, etc.)
3. Perform temporary actions
4. Find the root cause
5. Standardize to avoid recurrences

Go to Gemba!

The essence of everything you read can be summed up in this sentence. To understand you need to see, identify the problems, and create action plans to solve them.

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