A Japanese word that means “stacking up”, Yamazumi is the method of balancing the workload between workstations of the same process. By leveling cycle times of all stations and matching them with the customer takt time, it greatly reduces unevenness, waiting times and overburden. This is usually made clear using a stacked bar chart – the Yamazumi chart.
Yokoten is a Japanese word meaning “horizontal deployment” which can also be translated as “across everywhere”. However, in Lean culture yokoten goes beyond the usual notion of communicating best practices. It is seen as a peer-to-peer (not top-down) transfer of knowledge in which people from one area of the organization are expected to go and see for themselves how another area is doing kaizen, so they can adopt it, adapt it and eventually improve it and share it forward. Within the PDCA way of thinking, yokoten happens in the Act stage and drives the spread of excellence, aiming to prevent valuable ideas to be only vaguely transferred or not transferred at all. When full knowledge conveying and refining is finally on everybody’s mind, yokoten becomes a cultural feature with tremendous potential for success multiplying. No wonder it has been dubbed as the really hard part of Lean Transformation.