2009年02月的文章

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...