A story I heard from a plant manager at Reiter Automotive (supplier of sound-dampening materials) helped put into perspective what it takes to build in quality. He ran a plant that makes sound-dampening materials in...
You can extend Toyota Way Principle 4: Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time to the office environment. Of course you are not going to hang andon...
If American and European companies got anything from the invasion of Japanese products to the U.S. market in the 1980s, it was quality fever. The level of quality consciousness in Japanese companies made our heads...
This point has been made earlier in the article, but it bears repeating: the closer you are to one-piece flow, the quicker quality problems will surface to be addressed. This hit home for me personally...
Jidoka, the second pillar of TPS, traces back to Sakichi Toyoda and his long string of inventions that revolutionized the automatic loom. Among his inventions was a device that detected when a thread broke and,...
These days aluminum gutters for houses, at least in the U.S., are mostly built to order, on-site at the house. Rolls of materials are brought to the job site, where they are cut to length,...
Every business would like to have a consistent volume over time so there is a consistent and predictable workload. That is an easy sell in concept. But if your sales department does not behave like...
Leveling out a work schedule is easier in high-volume manufacturing than in typically lower-volume service environments. How do you level schedules in a service operation where service providers are responding to customers and the lead...
Cho’s quote at the opening of this chapter suggested customers may have to wait a little longer if they want to order a vehicle specially built for them. He is not willing to sacrifice the...
Leveling the schedule has profound benefits throughout the value stream, including giving you the ability to plan every detail of production meticulously and standardizing work practices. If you visit a Toyota plant or a Toyota...
Heijunka is the leveling of production by both volume and product mix. It does not build products according to the actual flow of customer orders, which can swing up and down wildly, but takes the...