Norman Bodek Biography
Norman Bodek has led over 60 industrial study missions to Japan, Bodek discovered, brought over, translated and popularized many of the Japanese quality tools, techniques and technologies that transformed American industry in the mid-1980s and 1990s. He discovered and published the works of the truly great Japanese manufacturing geniuses: Shigeo Shingo and Taiichi Ohno, the inventors of the Toyota Production System, now called JIT and lean manufacturing; Yoji Akao, the creator of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Hoshin Kanri; and Seiichi Nakajima, the originator of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and many others. Bodek co-authored (with Bunji Tozawa) The Idea Generator—Quick and Easy Kaizen (Available from QCI International).

The Workshop
How do you motivate all employees to submit lots and lots of creative improvement ideas to improve customer service, improve quality, reduce cost, improve safety and reduce the time it takes to deliver products and services?

This workshop will teach you how to effectively stimulate and manage a revolutionary implemented idea system. The employee that comes up with the idea implements it. This is not a suggestion system in which someone comes up with an idea for someone else to install. This system is not an additional burden to management.

This workshop was run in 2001 at Silicon Forest Electronics in Vancouver, Washington, and employees are now implementing—on average—two new improvement ideas per month. Power of one new idea: Linda, an employee at Silicon, built her own fixture similar to a drummer’s pad with sandpaper glued on top. Her old way was to rub the sandpaper against the IC board. Now Linda firmly rubs the IC boards against the sandpaper, which is easier to do, pleases her customers more and eliminating the occasional nicks and cuts from the old method. Frank Nichols the CEO of Silicon was thrilled with Linda’s idea. Imagine how Linda felt about her idea, the building of the board and the recognition received. It was just a WOW!