Toyota Production System Book Review

The first one of book offers about lean manufacturing should be Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, actually. Because this book is the book that TPS(Toyota Production System) is explained from Taiichi Ohno, the father of lean manufacturing. I read Toyota Production System book several times in my studentship period. It is more meaningful when I read now after even 8 months job experience. Let’s start to examine the first book of lean manufacturing followers’ libraries.

If we look the life of book’s writer, Taiichi Ohno shortly, Mr. Ohno was born in 1912 and graduated from a technical high school which is equal with university now in 1932. He started to work in Toyoda company (Company’s name is changed as Toyota after.) in the same year. He is seen as an industrial engineer due to his works and studies but industrial engineering notion wasn’t discovered in that days. It is more proper that he was a mechanical engineer. He spent almost all of his 45 years working life in Toyota companies.

Toyota Production System is published firstly in Japan in 1978. It is translated and published in USA in 1988. Its publication in Europe is in 1990s. Mr. Ohno is retired due to age limit in 1978 and he wrote this book in the same year. The information about main principles of Toyota Production System is given at first hand.

The book started with “The Oil Crisis Opened Our Eyes.” sentence. The changing of world’s perspective towards TPS began with Toyota’s positive graphic even in petrol crisis which affected to whole world, as I mentioned in my What is Lean Production? writing. There are comparisons with Ford and American automobile industry in the beginning of the book and after. Because they are the pioneers of the automobile sector and Toyota evaluated itself when founded by looking at them.

JIT, jidoka, Kanban, heijunka, SMED, 5 Why, 7 muda and standard work which are lean manufacturing tools are explained in detail. Giving short information about them is hard. All of them is independently a writing issue. Instead, I want to make comments about places which I underlined especially in the book.

• “Cost Reduction is the Goal” and “…Saying this in reverse, the criterion of all decisions is whether cost reduction can be achieved.” sentences must be actually compass of all works which we started at factory at 8 a.m. If departments which independent from costs like work safety are separated, only one question must be in our head whatever we do at the end of the day. What is the contribution of your work to cost reduction or increasing the profit? Taiichi says about the topic in a different sentence like that: “In my opinion, industrial engineering has no meaning unless it reduces costs and increases profits.” Industrial engineers are working in many fields today, of course. But, if we look the aim of occurrence and most of the courses taken in the university, notions like cost reduction and efficiency increasing are our actual works. It is a striking sentence for people has industrial engineering title.
• “The Toyota production system began I challenged the old system.”, “It took 10 years to establish Kanban at the Toyota Motor Company.”, “Toyota’s top management watched the situation quietly, and I admire the attitude they took.” sentences were taken from the different paragraphs. Mr. Ohno started to implement his innovations on his responsible areas when he was just a production chief. He had also managers but skill of implementing ideas in his mind and his self-confidence when the probability of failure was higher are surprising and inspiring. It is a fact that most of companies which try to implement lean manufacturing fail. The sentences above show how much trouble even Mr. Ohno, the founder of this system faces. It is the hard thing that people resist the system which they didn’t implement previously. Management’s support is the most important thing against that resistance. Mr. Ohno never succeed without management’s support. One of the most important reasons of failure of companies which want to implement lean manufacturing is management’s unawareness about lean and not giving 100% support to changes.
• “To tell the truth, the Toyota production system has been built on the practice and evaluation of this scientific approach.” People thinks that mentioned approach must be an impressive approach but it is only 5 Whys Technique. Asking why 5 times in the face of problems, finding root cause of it, solving, and preventing its occurrence one more. I don’t think that this simple approach. I think that this simple principle is not valued as much as it should be and not applied to every problem faced. If we don’t apply 5 Whys Technique, we just repair or patch the rips but the problem is that repairing or patching never ends in the production environment.
• “My Plant-First Principle”, “Even today, as part of top management, I have been unable to separate myself from the reality found in the production plant. The time that provides me with the most vital information about management is the time I spend in the plant, not in the vice president’s office.” The quotations show how important Genchi Genbutsu(Go and see for yourself) notion is from president to engineer. We should keep it in our mind at all positions of our career.
• “Some time in 1937-1938, my boss at Toyoda Spinning and Weaving told me to prepare standard work methods for textile work. It was a difficult project. From a book on standard work methods I bought from Maruzen, I managed to do the job.” I want to quote this sentence lastly. Buying a book for a doing a job properly. What a devotion to buy a book to do a given task. Therefore, Taiichi became Taiichi Ohno who is a world-wide known engineer through such behaviours showed in age 25-26.

Who is suitable for book? The language of book is so simple and main notions of lean manufacturing are explained in detail. From this aspect, everybody includes managers and also students can read. Engineers who work on improvement of production at factories like me read should read over and over again.