This is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox by Niklas Modig & Pär Åhlström

Author:Niklas Modig & Pär Åhlström [Modig, Niklas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rheologica Publishing
Published: 2014-04-27T03:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Welcome to the Wild West...

We call it lean

Toyota’s internal production philosophy, the Toyota Production System (TPS), has been developed over nearly a century. Today, TPS is a well-known concept in the West and a role model for manufacturing and service organizations alike. TPS is even more fully established in Japan.

Development in Japan has gone so far that virtually every bookshop in the country sells books such as TPS for Dummies and Let’s Study TPS in English.

Towards the end of the 1980s, there was a surge of interest in Toyota among Western researchers. They assigned the label “lean” to their observations, thereby launching a new concept. Although the term “lean”

was created with Toyota as a starting point, lean and TPS are two different concepts. Although they have been developed and described in parallel, they are two different concepts.

Ohno defines the Toyota Production System

Taiichi Ohno started his career within the Toyoda family’s group of companies in 1932 and is often referred to as “the Father of TPS.” Through common sense and total dedication to the company over nearly sixty years, Ohno continuously developed Toyota’s production philosophy. Together with Eiji Toyoda, cousin of Kiichiro Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, Ohno gave the philosophy the name

“Toyota Production System.” In 1978, Ohno published a book entitled Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Ohno rejected economies of scale and large-scale production and maintained that productivity was created through flow:

"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 the time-line by reducing the non-value adding wastes."

Initially, Ohno’s book was published only in Japanese. It remains the most read book among Toyota’s Japanese employees and is referred to as the company’s bible. Although the book is aimed at manufacturing, Toyota’s managers claim that everything that any leader needs to know about TPS can be read “between the lines” of the book.

Ohno’s book was first published in English in 1988. Prior to its publication, many Western authors had tried to explain TPS, but none had managed to do so in an easily accessible way.

Lean sees the light of day

The term “lean production” first appeared in 1988, when it was used by John Krafcik in his article “Triumph of the Lean Production System,” published in Sloan Management Review. The article compared productivity levels between different car manufacturers and identified two types of production systems: a robust system and a fragile system. Krafcik destroyed the myth that productivity was created through economies of scale and advanced technology (robust production systems) and proved instead that those factories (such as Toyota) that had low inventory, low buffers, and simple technology (fragile production systems) were able to deliver high productivity and high quality. Krafcik thought that the term “fragile” had negative connotations; instead, he used the term

“lean” to represent the efficient production system.

The book that changed the world

The ideas that Krafcik’s article expressed were developed as part of the International Motor Vehicle Program, in which Krafcik participated.

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