ABSTRACT
Improvement means the elimination of waste, and the most essential precondition for improvement is the proper pursuit of goals. The four goals of improvement must be to make things: easier, better, faster, and cheaper. In a procedure used to build television cabinets, boards were joined to one another with glue and then dried. This used to take a long time, because the joined boards were placed in a drying oven and dried from the outside. In many hole-boring operations a bit cuts through the entire hole section. For large diameter holes, moreover, a small guide hole is often drilled in the center and then a larger bit widens the hole. When people treat high-diversity, low-volume production as a "big deal," they should realize that this sort of thinking is, in itself, a problem. High-diversity, low-volume production seems like a big deal because many kinds of products are made in small lots.
