In technology innovation, nothing beats ‘Going to Gemba’

By BRAD CARLSON //

Gemba, the place where things happen, is crucial to successful innovation.

Gemba is a Japanese phrase meaning “the actual place.” It’s a term used often in the Toyota Production System, a comprehensive manufacturing-management system developed by Toyota to achieve efficiency, high quality and waste elimination.

“Going to Gemba” was a practice broadly adopted by the Danaher Corp., where I worked for about 10 years. The concept is simple: Truly understanding a problem usually requires investigation at the source.

This is one of the most important concepts for product developers to adopt and deploy. Going to Gemba is the best way to gain the experience of the customer quickly and efficiently, and critical to defining the value of innovation.

Gemba can be anywhere: a laboratory, a manufacturing line, a co-worker’s desk. Some of the most exciting trips to Gemba come from visiting customer sites – engineers should immerse themselves in their customers’ environment, walk in their shoes, build a passion to solve their problems.

When I was working at dental-imaging solutions provider DEXIS, I needed to solve an intermittent problem plaguing DEXIS Platinum, a sensor that captures X-ray images of teeth. Customers reported an intermittent malfunction, but when it was returned to our customer service center the malfunction could not be replicated.

This went on for months, at a cost of millions of dollars in returned products. My instinct told me to go to Gemba and experience the problem firsthand.

My frequent-flyer status went through the roof. It took weeks and dozens of customer visits to identify the root cause of the problem, which could only be solved by leveraging innovative diagnostic tools to capture the fault.

Not only did we ultimately figure it out, but the customer appreciated our commitment to problem solving and we gained significant customer loyalty.

Even quick journeys to Gemba can pay off. When I worked for Symbol Technologies (now part of Zebra Technologies), there was a problem with one of our products at a Rolls Royce factory in Derby, England, and off I went.

I landed at Heathrow around midnight local time, took a car service to Derby, slept for a few hours and hit the customer site at 8 a.m. After one day of working through some challenging barcode-imaging applications, I was back in the car to Heathrow and back to New York. Just 36 hours total – but the insights gained from visiting the Rolls Royce factory led to significant strides in our product innovation.

“Gemba walks” are not always challenging. In fact, they often involve positive stories about how products help people in their everyday lives.

I once visited a Virginia neurologist who was using LivaNova’s vagus nerve stimulator to treat epilepsy. He’d been treating a 70-year-old male for about a decade when he suggested a VNS implant to help control his seizures. The patient – who loved cars and driving – had been diagnosed in his early 20s and had been ineligible for a driver’s license ever since.

The VNS device, in combination with other treatments, led to 12 months without a seizure, allowing the patient to realize his dream of driving again. He bought a new Jaguar and graciously hit the road.

Of course, going to Gemba doesn’t always require actual travel. When I started working on LivaNova’s epilepsy-treatment device, one of the first things I did was read “A Mind Unraveled” by Kurt Eichenwald, a fantastic memoir of Eichenwald’s life with epilepsy. My goal was to gain a better understanding of patients’ needs – another way of understanding the customer’s environment and how they operate in it.

Going to Gemba is not always easy, especially with Long Island traffic. But the knowledge gained often leads to breakthrough innovation that your customers participate in – and they’ll appreciate you all the more because of it.

Brad Carlson is vice president of technology and business development at Hauppauge-based Intelligent Product Solutions.