The Toyota Production System

Toyota Production System (= real Lean)

In his book “Toyota Production System” published the first time in Japanese in 1978,
Taiici Ohno (1988) described the step-by-step development of Toyota’s super
efficient production concept. The TPS was developed incrementally over the years
1945-1975. TPS focuses on producing the highest quality, at the lowest cost, with the
shortest leadtimes, through the elimination of waste in all operations. It takes the
ideas of mass production by Fredrick Taylor and Henry Ford a giant step forward, by
adding an invariable customer perspective.
The TPS is a holistic system of production principles, often symbolised by the “TPS
house” shown below. It all starts with robust processes (“Stability”), that are kept
stable by leveling of production plans (“Heijunka”), kept constant by “Standardized
work”, and continuously improved (“Kaizen”). The principle of “Just-In-Time”
means that each process produces exactly what is needed, with the minimum amount
of resources, just when the customer (the next process) needs it. The same
importance is given to the principle of “Jidoka”, which explains how people should
work together with technology to make the best of both.

The Toyota Production System (Source: lean.org)

Then, in 1990, the famous book “The Machine that changed the World” by Womack,
Jones and Roos, described the superiority of TPS over Western automobile
production concepts, and introduced the world for the term “Lean production”. Lean
is basically just a new name for TPS—better fitted for the American and European
audiences. What a success it has became! Today, few scholars will dispute the
potential cost savings of successfully implementing a Lean in many type of
industries. Lean manufacturing has become the dominant manufacturing paradigm
since its introduction and its dissemination continuous to grow also outside the
manufacturing industry.

Today, there is an on-going trend for companies to develop their own company-
specific production systems (XPSs). Inspired by the TPS, they believe that developing
a tailored system for their companies is much better than relying on consultants
selling scattered lean projects (I explained why in an earlier post). Half a century
after its development, the TPS has inspired thousands of such XPSs. TPS is the
perfect production system, but only for Toyota…
The recent fall and rise of Toyota
However, never a success without a mob: Toyota skeptics has been fed by huge
recalls from Toyota the latest years. The first occurred in November 2009, when
many new Toyota’s reported uncontrolled acceleration because of floor mats sliding
under the gas pedal. Then, in January 2010 another acceleration problem was
identified. During the next months, close to 10 million cars were recalled all over the
world (!). And it did not end there; Toyota has had several other recalls the last years.
In October 2012, for example, 7.5 cars were recalled due to a possible defect in
the power window switch (including Yaris).

Many have concluded that this marks the end of Toyota as the world’s manufacturing
champion. They’re wrong. There are two characteristics of the recalls: It is the same
error on all models and its made by suppliers. The latter fact does, of course, not
exempt Toyota from the responsibility—and that’s why there are recalls. Toyota will
for sure bounce back—because of, and not despite of, the Toyota Production System.