Number of words: 631

In 1950, as part of the occupation effort of putting a demotic Japan back on its economic feet, Deming was invited to teach in Tokyo. There he preached his gospel of using statistics for quality control by recording quality performance and analyzing it, then altering processes to improve quality and measuring the change and its outcome in turn. And on it would go, with repeated refinement, measurement, alteration, measurement, and so on, in pursuit of total quality. At Toyota, this gave birth to the doctrine of kaizen, or continuous improvement. To this, Ohno added the concept of elimination of waste (muda in japanese). This meant waste of time, materials, energy, and even money by having brought-in components lying around for a long time before they were needed. Again this was an American import. Like Eiji Toyoda, Ohno visited Ford factories in Dearborn in the late 1940s. The founder of Toyota, Kiichiro Toyoda, had always been a great admirer of Henry Ford and made all his managers read Ford’s book, My Life and Work. Indeed, in the late 1930s, the two companies had contemplated some sort of joint venture, until Pearl Harbor cut short their discussions. But Ohno was surprised to find how old-fashioned the Dearborn plants seemed. There seemed to be nothing but huge machines and great piles of inventory around them, with everybody busy feeding the machines to keep them working at a great rate so as to reduce the cost of each piece stamped or cut or ground. But after each operation, the parts lay around for days, until great forklift trucks moved them to another pile before they were processed again. Ohno concluded that the young upstart Toyota could do better: David would show Goliath a thing or two. In those days, Toyota was making only about forty trucks a day, while Ford’s Rouge plant alone was making eight hundred. Despite the volumes churned out by the most famous factory in the world, by the firm that invented the mass-production car industry, Ohno was unimpressed. 

Yet something else did catch his interest. Ohno had never seen a supermarket before he went to America. Instead of the small mom-and-pop corner stores, to this day still prevalent in most Japanese towns and suburbs, he saw these vast emporia, with their shelves of products being continuously stacked. He noted the nonstop flow of deliveries and the way goods moved quickly from delivery truck to store shelves, with little time stacked in backrooms. When stocks of loaves or milk on the shelves went low, new supplies were wheeled in. Ohno had a sort of epiphany: he saw in a flash the possibilities of applying the same principles to manufacturing. He realized that the same principle could be applied to Toyota car factories. Translated from retailing to manufacturing, this became the basis of just in-time production. 

So there evolved the Toyota Production System (TPS), based on three principles: dedication to quality, to the elimination of all sorts of waste, and to continuous improvement. The linchpin of the war on waste was the system of kanban for the supply of parts; based on the lessons Ohno learned walking the aisles of American supermarkets. The aim is to supply parts only as they are needed, rather than have them piled up in stores, forming an expensive inventory. The way it works on the shop floor is that when one bin of parts is emptied, another has to be arriving to take its place. This is what made the expression just-in-time or lean manufacturing, shorthand for TPS. Its architect was Ohno, inspired by the techniques of Deming and by the example of. Michigan supermarkets. 

Excerpted from Page 123-125 of ‘Zoom: The Global Race to fuel the car of the future’ by Iain Carson and V Vaitheeswaran