Image from the Collections of Henry Ford. 1) P.O. 3015.A

Taiichi Ohno - the father of the Toyota Production System

The book published in 1990 by Womack, Jones and Roos after the five-year survey on the automobile industry

Lean Manufacturing had its beginning with Henry Ford and his motion assembly line, which later became the model on which Toyota based its own production system in the 40’s. “A line in continuous motion is a continuous flow of material” - later became the ideal of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The immediate conclusion was that anything that blocks or slows the flow of material is a waste. Unfortunately, the Ford Motor Company didn’t stick to the original vision of Henry Ford who, in the Rouge plant, one of the largest manufacturing complexes of the time, paid attention to the flow of material in order to obtain as many possible copies of the T model while keeping the machines always on, whether the downstream processes were available or not. The inter-operational stocks grew dramatically as every machine worked at its own time cycle, regardless of the demands of the other processes.

Ford made the mistake of turning the Rouge plant into a series of "process villages" - disconnected islands filled with semi-finished products waiting to be assembled in the final vehicle. The market demand fluctuations were absorbed by a production that forced the finished products in the sales network (push system). The flow of production (as it was designed by Ford in 1914) was transformed into mass production.

Meanwhile, Toyota was developing its own system of lean manufacturing, one that could fulfill the need for flexibility in production (in fact the Toyota market was initially limited to Japan, which required a small amount of products with great variability) and that could deal with the lack of infrastructure - available for the Ford Motor Company. Taichii Ohno was responsible of recovering the huge productivity gap between Toyota and the American companies: he got a number of ideas from Western experiences in manufacturing. He managed to develop the TPS. The Toyota automatic line stopped whenever there was a quality problem: this was the basis for the concept of Jidoka (intrinsic quality) in the Toyota Production System.
The moving assembly line from Ford was the model for “the material in constant motion”. Ford’s books, like "Today and Tomorrow" where the basis of the concepts of lean production were explained, inspired the manager of Toyota. Ohno also created the supermarket system: store a small amount of all the products that your customer may want, and supply them only the objects that are used. This is called a pull production system.
Toyota, unlike Ford, recognized the importance of workers, who were not only the workforce but even owners of the process and motivated through incentives such as secure jobs and employee rights like those recognized in Europe. Another key discovery of Toyota was the possibility of making the assembly line flexible for products exchange, minimizing the time of setup and changeover.
The Toyota Production System (TPS) was developed between 1945 and 1970 but is still a concept in constant evolution. The oil crisis that struck the global economy in 1973 brought the Japanese economy to a collapse in a period with zero growth: during this period, Toyota, despite a reduction in profits, continued to grow and earn. This raised the interest of other Japanese companies in the TPS.

The American auto industry only woke up in 1990 when the book "The machine that changed the world" was published, created from an American survey of the 80s on the auto assembly plants in America, Europe and Japan. This book showed the results achieved by Toyota and the huge gap between the quality and productivity of the Japanese and American industry. The term Lean Manufacturing originated from this book because Toyota was doing more with less of everything. Less space, less people, less capital and fewer stores.

The Lean concept has proven to be superior to mass production, and all the contemporary companies will choose to implement it to avoid the risk of extinction. Waste can no longer be tolerated in today’s competitive global economy. Each year, Toyota has an annual profit consistently higher than the earnings of GM, Ford and Chrysler all together. Since the beginning of 2007 the volumes of Toyota have equaled those of General Motors but its net profit margin was 8 times higher than the average for the automotive sector. The design and development of a new product takes 12 months for Toyota while the primary American and European competitors need 2-3 years to develop a new model.

Toyota is now the worldwide reference company for high quality products, high productivity, reduced time cycles and high flexibility.