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Toyota Production System

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Toyota Production System

(Adapted from Slack, et al. 2006)

Seen as the leading practitioner and the main originator of the lean approach, the Toyota Motor Company has progressively synchronised all its processes simultaneously to give high quality, fast throughput and exceptional productivity. It has done this by developing a set of practices that has largely shaped what we now call ‘lean’ or ‘just-in-time’ but which Toyota calls the Toyota Production System (TPS). The TPS has two themes, ‘just-in-time’ and ‘jidoka’.’Just-in-time’ is defined as the rapid and coordinated movement of parts throughout the production system and supply network to meet customer demand. It is operationalised by means of heijunka (levelling and smoothing the flow of items), kanban (signalling to the preceding process that more parts are needed), and nagare (laying out processes to achieve smoother flow of parts throughout the production process). Jidoka is described as ‘humanizing the interface between operator and machine’. Toyota’s philosophy is that the machine is there to serve the operator’s purpose. The operator should be left free to exercise his or her judgement. Jidoka is operationalised by means of fail-safe (or machine jidoka), line-stop authority (or human jidoka), and visual control (at-a-glance status of production processes and visibility of process standards).

Toyota believes that both just-in-time and jidoka should be applied ruthlessly to the elimination of waste, where waste is defined as ‘anything other than the minimum amount of equipment, items, part and works that are absolutely essential to production’. Fujio Cho of Toyota identified seven types of waste that must be eliminated from all operations processes. They are waste from overproduction, waste from waiting time, transportation waste, inventory waste, processing waste, waste of motion, and waste

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