The toyota production system

The Toyota Production System | |
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|The "Thinking" Production System: TPS as a winning strategy for developing people in the global manufacturing environment |
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|Teruyuki Minoura, Senior Managing Director, Chief Officer of Business Development Group & Purchasing Group. Mr. Minoura's previous|
|position was managing director of global purchasing, Toyota Motor Corporation. He also servedas president and CEO of Toyota Motor|
|Manufacturing NA from 1998 to 2002. |
|(Photo courtesy of Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun) |
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|At the 2003 Automotive Parts System Solution Fair held in Tokyo, June 18, 2003, Teruyuki Minoura, Toyota's managing director of |
|global purchasing at the time, talked about his experiences with TPS (the Toyota Production System), and what it means for |
|suppliers and for the future of the auto industry.|
|At the 2003 Automotive Parts System Solution Fair, held in Tokyo, June 18, 2003, Teruyuki Minoura, then-managing director of |
|global purchasing, Toyota Motor Corporation, talked about his experiences with TPS (the Toyota Production System), and what it |
|means for suppliers and for the future of the auto industry.|
|Teruyuki Minoura is confident that the long-standing principles of the Toyota Production System will not change in the future, and|
|that TPS will be able to meet any challenge. He noted that the system originally emerged through a trial-and-error approach aimed |
|at solving practical problems and meeting the needs of the company. Recalling painfulmemories of the labor dispute of 1950 that |
|destroyed so many friendships, he observed, "Businesses suffer if efforts are devoted to raising productivity when the products |
|themselves cannot sell." It was through such experiences, that the basic concept of just-in-time was born. |
|In simplest terms, Just-in-time is "all about producing only what's needed andtransferring only what's needed," says Minoura. |
|Instead of the old top-down "push" system, it represented a change to a "pull" system where workers go and fetch only what is |
|required. Tools, including the kanban (information card), andon (display board), and poka yoke (error prevention) were developed |
|to implement the pull system. But, Minoura warns "simply introducing kanban cardsor andon boards doesn't mean you've implemented |
|the Toyota Production System, for they remain nothing more than mere tools. The new information technologies are no exception, and|
|they should also be applied and implemented as tools." |
|Early in his career, Minoura worked under Taiichi Ohno, recognized as thecreator of the Toyota Production System. Ohno, through |
|tireless trial and error, managed to put into practice a "pull" system that stopped the factory producing unnecessary items. But |
|Minoura observes that it was only by developing this "loose collection of techniques" into a fully-fledged system, dubbed the |
|Toyota Production System or TPS, that they were able to deploy this...