Risuke Kubochi, General Manager of General Engineering, stepped forward and agreed to lead the effort. He was formerly the chief engineer of Celica. He had a reputation for being aggressive and not terribly friendly, but strongly determined to accomplish any task he undertook. Kubochi personally selected 10 middle managers to work on his team. This [...]

Since so much of the success of Lexus depended on achieving these breakthrough performance objectives for the engine, and since this depended so heavily on production engineering, Suzuki presented a number of strict requirements to the engine production engineers, whose response was largely discouraging. Their first reaction was that you cannot make parts that are [...]

Developing a good concept, with its associated targets, will make or break any vehicle development program. If the concept is not well thought through and does not properly identify the market and how the vehicle will hit the market just right, then even excellent execution of the program will not matter. Efficiency does not equal [...]

Yukiyasu Togo was a successful Toyota executive in charge of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, in Southern California. His friends and associates were also well-to-do executives. But few would consider buying a Toyota. Mercedes and BMW were more their style. This bothered Togo. He was a fighter and not willing to accept being second-class. Making high-quality, [...]

So you set up your kanban system. (Kanban is the Japanese word for “card,” “ticket,” or “sign” and is a tool for managing the flow and production of materials in a Toyota-style “pull” production system.) You plug in the andon, which is a visual control device in a production area that alerts workers to defects, [...]

For decades Toyota was doing just fine in applying and improving TPS on the shop floor day in and day out without documenting TPS theory. Workers and managers were constantly learning new methods and variations on old methods through actual practice on the shop floor. Communication was strong in what was a relatively small company, [...]

The traditional approach to process improvement focuses on identifying local efficiencies—“Go to the equipment, the value-added processes, and improve uptime, or make it cycle faster, or replace the person with automated equipment.” The result might be a significant percent improvement for that individual process, but have little impact on the overall value stream. This is [...]

In the 1950s, Ohno returned to the place he understood best, the shop floor, and went to work to change the rules of the game. He did not have a big consulting firm, Post-it® notes, or PowerPoint to reinvent his business processes. He could not install an ERP system or use the Internet to make [...]

When Eiji Toyoda and his managers took their 12-week study tour of U.S plants in 1950, they were expecting to be dazzled by their manufacturing progress. Instead they were surprised that the development of mass production techniques hadn’t changed much since the 1930s. In fact, the production system had many inherent flaws. What they saw [...]

Toyota Motor Corporation struggled through the 1930s, primarily making simple trucks. In the early years, the company produced poor-quality vehicles with primitive technology (e.g., hammering body panels over logs) and had little success. In the 1930s, Toyota’s leaders visited Ford and GM to study their assembly lines and carefully read Henry Ford’s articles, Today and [...]

His “mistake-proof” loom became Toyoda’s most popular model, and in 1929 he sent his son, Kiichiro, to England to negotiate the sale of the patent rights to Platt Brothers, the premier maker of spinning and weaving equipment. His son negotiated a price of 100,000 English pounds, and in 1930 he used that capital to start [...]

The story begins with Sakichi Toyoda, a tinkerer and inventor, not unlike Henry Ford, who grew up in the late 1800s in a remote farming community outside of Nagoya. At that time, weaving was a major industry and the Japanese government, wishing to promote the development of small businesses, encouraged the creation of cottage industries [...]

Critics often describe Toyota as a “boring company.” This is the kind of boring I like. Top quality year in and year out. Steadily growing sales. Consistent profitability. Huge cash reserves. Of course, operational efficiency by itself can be dangerous. Think of the Swiss companies that were so efficient in making mechanical watches yet are [...]

When I first began learning about TPS, I was enamored of the power of one-piece flow. The more I learned about the benefits of flowing and pulling parts as they were needed, rather than pushing and creating inventory, the more I wanted to experience the transformation of mass production processes into lean processes first hand. [...]

The Toyota Production System is Toyota’s unique approach to manufacturing. It is the basis for much of the “lean production” movement that has dominated manufacturing trends (along with Six Sigma) for the last 10 years or so. Despite the huge influence of the lean movement, I hope to show in this article that most attempts [...]

We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action; try to do something? You realize how little you know and you face your own failures and you simply can correct those failures [...]