Toyota Production System Quotes

One method is to try asking the question "why" as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually this will happen by the fifth “why.” This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was "the basis of Toyota's scientific approach ... by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.

The two pillars of the Toyota production system are just-in-time and automation with a human touch, or autonomation.

The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises. (Ohno, 1988)

The Toyota Production System unlocked employees’ capacity to suggest innovations by giving them more control. The Disney system does something different. It forces people to use their own emotions to write dialogue for cartoon characters, to infuse real feelings into situations that, by definition, are unreal and fantastical. This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management.

In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created.

Every person in an organization has the right to be the company’s top expert at something,” John Shook, who trained Madrid as one of Toyota’s first Western employees, told me. “If I’m attaching mufflers or I’m a receptionist or a janitor, I know more about exhaust systems or receiving people or cleaning offices than anyone else, and it’s incredibly wasteful if a company can’t take advantage of that knowledge. Toyota hates waste. The system was built to exploit everyone’s expertise.

When Toyota invented its famous kanban system of just-in-time production, one of its quality control rules was that any employee on the assembly line could pull the cord to stop production if he noticed a quality problem.57 That

Toyota has a rather unusual production process. If anybody on the production line is having a problem or observes an error, that person pulls a cord that halts production across the plant. Senior executives rush over to see what has gone wrong and, if an employee is having difficulty performing her job, she is helped as needed by executives. The error is then assessed, lessons learned, and the system adapted. It is called the Toyota Production System, or TPS, and is one of the most successful techniques in industrial history. “The system was about cars, which are very different from people,” Kaplan says when we meet for an interview. “But the underlying principle is transferable. If a culture is open and honest about mistakes, the entire system can learn from them. That is the way you gain improvements.

underlies the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, this goes by the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, which is one of the most important phrases in the lean manufacturing vocabulary. In English, it is usually translated as a directive to “go and see for yourself” so that business decisions can be based on deep firsthand knowledge. Jeffrey Liker, who has extensively documented the “Toyota Way,” explains it this way: In my Toyota interviews, when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs. You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to

To implement the Toyota production system in your own business, there must be a total understanding of waste. Unless all sources of waste are detected and crushed, success will always be just a dream.

A key difference between Toyota and 3M is the scope of leeway for experiments. Toyota’s community of scientists works to perfect a system of production designed to remove unwanted variation and ensure perfect quality; the scope of experiments is limited for the most part to those that improve existing processes. At 3M, in contrast, scientists are invited to go wild, think outside the box, and imagine useful products that don’t yet even begin to exist. But in both systems, psychological safety plays a vital role.

How Long Will It Take? You can’t blame people for wanting instant results. Time is money, and quickness, especially quick OODA loops, is good. But when it comes to adopting maneuver conflict / Boyd’s principles to your business, there is a lot to be learned and a lot to be done. Consider that: •   According to its principle creator, Taiichi Ohno, it took 28 years (1945-1973) to create and install the Toyota Production System, which is maneuver conflict applied to manufacturing. •   It takes roughly 15 years of experience—and recognition as a leader in one’s technical field—to qualify as a susha (development manager) for a new Toyota vehicle.150 •   Studies of people regarded as the top experts in a number of fields suggest that they practice about four hours a day, virtually every day, for 10 years before they achieve a recognized level of mastery.151 •   It takes a minimum of 8 years beyond a bachelor’s degree to train a surgeon (4 years medical school and 4 or more years of residency.) •   It takes four to six years on the average beyond a bachelor’s degree to complete a Ph.D. •   It takes three years or so to earn a black belt (first degree) in the martial arts and four to six years beyond that to earn third degree, assuming you are in good physical condition to begin with. •   It takes a bare minimum of five years military service to qualify for the Special Forces “Green Beret” (minimum rank of corporal / captain with airborne qualification, then a 1-2 year highly rigorous and selective training program.) •   It takes three years to achieve proficiency as a first level leader in an infantry unit—a squad leader.152 It is no less difficult to learn to fashion an elite, highly competitive company. Yet for some reason, otherwise intelligent people sometimes feel they should be able to attend a three-day seminar and return home experts in maneuver conflict as applied to business. An intensive orientation session may get you started, but successful leaders study their art for years—Patton, Rommel, and Grant were all known for the intensity with which they studied military history and current campaigns. Then-LTC David Hackworth had commanded 10 other units before taking over the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry in Vietnam in 1969, as he described in Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts. You may also recall the scene in We Were Soldiers where LTC Hal Moore unloaded armfuls of strategy and history books as he was moving into his quarters at Ft. Benning. At that point, he had been in the Army 20 years and had commanded at every level from platoon to battalion.

An Alternative to Goals A reporter once asked an official from Toyota whether the company achieved “six sigma” quality—a defect rate of around 3 in a million and also the name of a quality improvement methodology that is currently fashionable. His answer typifies the Boyd approach to goals: Basically, I would say that because of our evolutionary concept, whatever we were doing becomes the benchmark for what we do next. We hold onto what we were doing so that it becomes maintainable and it is the new steady state.140 This may seem like a masterwork of obfuscation, but it is entirely consistent with Toyota’s overall guiding concept: The Toyota Production System, quite simply, is about shortening the time it takes to convert customer orders into vehicle deliveries.141 This is one of the best vision / focusing statements in the world of business. Instead of setting arbitrary goals, it tells everybody who works for Toyota that whenever they are in doubt about what to do, take the action that will reduce customer-to-delivery span time. It sets a direction, not a goal, since wherever we are this year, we will be better next year.

lean manufacturing, a process that originated in Japan with the Toyota Production System,

Second, they free up capital for more-productive uses. Toyota’s production system, for example, allowed the automaker to operate with two months’—rather than two years’—worth of inventory on hand, which freed up massive amounts of cash.

It was while at the Toyota plant that he had a revelation. Toyota has a rather unusual production process. If anybody on the production line is having a problem or observes an error, that person pulls a cord that halts production across the plant. Senior executives rush over to see what has gone wrong and, if an employee is having difficulty performing her job, she is helped as needed by executives. The error is then assessed, lessons learned, and the system adapted. It is called the Toyota Production System, or TPS, and is one of the most successful techniques in industrial history. “The system was about cars, which are very different from people,” Kaplan says when we meet for an interview. “But the underlying principle is transferable. If a culture is open and honest about mistakes, the entire system can learn from them. That is the way you gain improvements.

The example of the Virginia Mason system reveals a crucial truth: namely, that learning from mistakes has two components. The first is a system. Errors can be thought of as the gap between what we hoped would happen and what actually did happen. Cutting-edge organizations are always seeking to close this gap, but in order to do so they have to have a system geared up to take advantage of these learning opportunities. This system may itself change over time: most experts are already trialing methods that they hope will surpass the Toyota Production System. But each system has a basic structure at its heart: mechanisms that guide learning and self-correction.

contributed to “making things in a set.” I have many

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods.

The upshot of all this was that Boyd concluded that the Toyota Production System was another implementation of the principles he had associated with the Blitzkrieg. As odd as this may seem—a doctrine of war and a car manufacturing system turning out to be brothers under the skin—they both use time as their principle strategic device, their organizational climates share several elements, and they both trace back to the school of strategy whose earliest known documentation is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Competitive analysis shouldn’t aim to snap a picture of “the answer,” rather it should build a picture around common themes but allow for changing parts. For example, Toyota is now allowing more option-package flexibility as it advances its data systems. But the core competitive story remains the same. By coming up with new products faster, it puts competitors on the marketing defensive.

Mr. Ohba, who started the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) in the United States. In a public presentation, he explained:† TPS is built on the scientific way of thinking. . . . How do I respond to this problem? Not a toolbox. [You have to be] willing to start small, learn through trial and error.

All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes.

Is it really economical to provide more information than we need - more quickly than we need it? This is like buying a large, high performance machine that produces too much. The extra items have to be stored in a warehouse, which increases the cost. Toyota's just-in-time production is a way to deliver exactly what the production line needs, when it is needed. This method does not require extra inventory. Similarly, we want information only when we need it. Information sent to production should be timed exactly.

Toyota calls its approach, which has evolved over decades of experimentation, the Toyota Production System, or TPS.

Ohno writes that he realized the solution when he heard about supermarkets (much before he actually saw a supermarket during his visit to the U.S. in 1956). He realized that both supermarkets and the feeding lines at Toyota needed to manage a large variety of products. In the supermarkets, products were not jam packing the aisles, rather most merchandise was held in the backroom storage. In the store itself, each product was allocated a limited shelf space. Only after a product was taken by a shopper, was replenishment from the backroom storage triggered to refill that product’s allotted shelf space. What Ohno envisioned is the mechanism that would enable him to guide Toyota’s operation when not to produce. Rather than using a single limited space between work centers to restrict work-in-process production, he had to limit the amount allowed to accumulate of each component specifically. Based on that realization Ohno designed the Kanban system.

The Lean Startup takes its name from the lean manufacturing revolution that Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo are credited with developing at Toyota. Lean thinking is radically altering the way supply chains and production systems are run. Among its tenets are drawing on the knowledge and creativity of individual workers, the shrinking of batch sizes, just-in-time production and inventory control, and an acceleration of cycle times. It taught the world the difference between value-creating activities and waste and showed how to build quality into products from the inside out.

Times of rapid change and increasing complexity require a shift from optimization towards innovation. Forcing workers to blindly execute the upfront plans and sequential processes of the “waterfall model” turns out not to be the one best way. But we do it anyway. Taylor’s obsession with time, order, and efficiency has been absorbed into the fabric of our culture. We share his faith in reductionism. We divide projects into phases into tasks. We separate people into teams into roles. We split work into steps and silos. Then things fall through the cracks. Figure 1-6. The Waterfall Model. It’s not that waterfall is wrong. In many contexts, it’s a useful model. The problem is that, all too often, we apply it without realizing it’s not the only way. Again, it helps to know history. In the 1950s, Toyota figured out how to avoid the pitfalls of Taylorism by embracing what’s now called Lean. In design, all relevant specialists were involved at the outset, so conflicts about resources and priorities were resolved early on. And in production, managers learned that by making small batches and giving every worker the ability to stop the line, they could identify, fix, and prevent errors more quickly and effectively. [40] Rather than serving as cogs in the machine, workers were expected to solve problems by using “the five why’s” to systematically trace every error to its root cause. Similarly, suppliers were expected to coordinate the flow of parts and information within the just-in-time supply system of kanban.

Toyota Production System—which in the United States would become known as “lean manufacturing”—relied on pushing decision making to the lowest possible level. Workers on the assembly line were the ones who saw problems first. They were closest to the glitches that were inevitable in any manufacturing process.

Hacer a medias es no hacer en absoluto Como ya dije, Scrum tomó muchas de sus ideas del modelo japonés de manufactura codificado en el libro clásico The Toyota Production System de Taiichi Ohno. En Estados Unidos, este modelo se interpretó como manufactura “saneada”. Básicamente, la idea es eliminar todo desperdicio posible en la fábrica. Y aunque la mayoría de nosotros no perseguimos mejorar el flujo de trabajo de una planta automotriz, algunas de las ideas de ese sistema son aplicables a cualquier clase de labor. Un concepto que quiero tocar aquí es el de “trabajo en proceso” o “inventario”. La idea es que tener muchas cosas regadas que no sirven para nada constituye un desperdicio. Esas cosas, sean puertas de automóviles o artilugios de cualquier especie, cuestan dinero y si están en la fábrica quiere decir que grandes sumas de dinero están atadas a un inventario que no se necesita por