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What is the Toyota Production System? When asked this question most people (80 percent) will echo the view of the average consumer and say: “It’s a kanban system”; another 15 percent may actually know how it functions in the factory and say: “It’s a production system”; only a very few (5 percent) really understand its purpose and say: “It’s a system for the absolute elimination of waste.”
Some people imagine that Toyota has put on a smart new set of clothes, the kanban system, so they go out and purchase the same outfit and try it on. They quickly discover that they are much too fat to wear it! They must eliminate waste and make fundamental improvements in their production systems before techniques like kanban can be of any help. The Toyota production system is 80 percent waste elimination, 15 percent production system, and only 5 percent kanban. This confusion stems from a misunderstanding of the relationship between basic principles of production at Toyota and kanban as a technique to help implement those principles. – Shigeo Shingo, A Study of the Toyota Production System |
{ 2009 05 27 }
Jason Yip | 29-May-09 at 2:50 am | Permalink
From Michikazu Tanaka’s description of things in The Birth of Lean, I’d even go beyond “system for the absolute elimination of waste” to a “system for creating positive tension in the workplace that motivates people to do better than they ever thought they could do”