Monthly Archive for February, 2009

You can effectively use pull-replenishment systems in the office to save money and help avoid shortages of supplies. Most offices use some form of pull system already. Nobody knows exactly how many pencils, erasers, or reams of paper will be used in an office. If there were a standing, scheduled order of all these things, [...]

The Toyota Way is not preoccupied with adhering to Principle 3, Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction. There are many examples of push scheduling throughout Toyota. One example is when dealing with parts shipped from Japan to the United States or even moved across the United States. They use traditional scheduling systems to order these [...]

A true one-piece-flow system would be a zero-inventory system where goods just appear when they are needed by the customer. The closest system Toyota has devised to achieve this is the one-piece flow cell that builds to order only at the precise time the product is needed. But when pure flow is not possible because [...]

One way to demystify the concept of kanban is by thinking of simple examples of pull-replenishment systems in everyday life. Like when you decide to buy gas for your car. Does your gas tank get filled according to a schedule? Would you consider simply filling the tank once per week on Monday morning? I doubt [...]

Taiichi Ohno and his associates were fascinated by the importance of the supermarket to daily life in America in the 1950s. It captured the imagination of retailers in Japan and was imported there, where Ohno studied it close up. Though Ohno recognized from the start that in many cases inventory was necessary to allow for [...]

So, life is good and all your problems and pains simply disappear by creating one-piece flow cells. Not by a long shot! In lean thinking, life will get tougher for a while—at least until you learn how to continuously improve your processes. Ohno explained: In 1947, we arranged machines in parallel lines or in an [...]

When you try to attain one-piece flow, you are also setting in motion numerous activities to eliminate all muda (wastes). Let’s take a closer look at a few of the benefits of flow. Builds in Quality. It is much easier to build in quality in one-piece flow. Every operator is an inspector and works to [...]

In competitive rowing, a key position is the coxswain—the little person in the back of the boat who is calling “row, row, row.” He or she is coordinating the activities of all the rowers so they are rowing at the same speed. Get a maverick rower who outperforms everyone else and guess what!—the boat gets [...]

Often we think that increasing the speed of a process means compromising quality, that faster is sloppier. But flow achieves just the opposite—it generally improves quality. We show one defective computer, with an X on the monitor. That one failed to turn on in the test stage. In the large batch approach, by the time [...]

What is the ideal way to organize your equipment and processes? In traditional mass production thinking (the way most companies are organized), the answer seems obvious: group similar machines and similarly skilled people together. So mass production thinking sets up departments of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, accounting, purchasing, and manufacturing as well as departments for [...]

A good place for any company to begin the journey to lean is to create continuous flow wherever applicable in its core manufacturing and service processes. Flow is at the heart of the lean message that shortening the elapsed time from raw materials to finished goods (or services) will lead to the best quality, lowest [...]

Anyone who witnessed the rebirth of Chrysler under Lee Iacocca knows that one of the best product decisions he made was to invest in the K-Car, the basis for all the new passenger cars introduced in the 1980s. It saved the company from ruin. Then, in the 1990s, he was willing to step back and [...]

When I think about Toyota and how it operates, I keep on coming back to quality guru W. Edwards Deming’s famous edict: “Constancy of purpose.” Constancy of purpose explains why, in any given year, if you bet Toyota will make a profit, you will probably win. If you bet that its sales will grow over [...]

We get a flavor of what distinguishes Toyota from excerpts of its mission statement for its North American operations compared with that of Ford . Ford’s mission statement seems reasonable. The company is concerned about being a leader in its products and services and wants to continually improve these to prosper as a business and [...]

One of my favorite discussions of the history of the development of the Japanese automobile industry is a article by Michael Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry (Cusumano, 1985), that contrasts in detail the evolution of Nissan and the evolution of Toyota. In his article, Cusumano clearly illustrates the different trajectories of the two companies. One [...]

Toyota understands that maintaining the jobs of associates is part of its obligation to the community and society. A great example of this is the case of Toyota’s longest-running manufacturing operation in the United States—a truck bed plant called TABC. In the 1960s the U.S. imposed a 30 percent surcharge on trucks that were imported, [...]

In the early 1980s, Toyota formed a joint venture with GM. It was Toyota’s first overseas plant and they did not want to go it alone. They agreed to teach GM the principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota proposed to take over a light truck factory in Fremont, California that had been closed [...]

I asked Jim Press how he learned the Toyota Way. He explained that the reason he joined the company was partly to move on from an environment at Ford where there was constant tension between doing business the way it should be done and the way it actually was done. When he went to a [...]

Can a modern corporation thrive in a capitalistic world and be profitable while doing the right thing, even if it means that short-term profits are not always the first goal? I believe that Toyota’s biggest contribution to the corporate world is that of providing a real-life example that this is possible. Throughout my visits to [...]

Notably missing from my recounting of this story are Principles 2-6 of the Toyota Way (under the category, The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results). These deal more with the processes used at Toyota to do the detailed work. These principles (creating flow, leveling the work load, stopping the process to ensure high quality, [...]