Toyota Production System Concepts

Toyota Motor Corporation made a system to make good products, save money, and make things faster by using less waste. TPS has two main parts, just-in-time and jidoka. It is often shown as a "house" image. To improve TPS and keep it running well, we use a process called PDCA or the scientific method. We do this by doing the same tasks over and over again and making small improvements called kaizen.

TPS was created by Taiichi Ohno, who managed production at Toyota after World War II. Ohno began using TPS at Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, starting with machining work. Then, he started using it in other parts of the company and also shared it with other suppliers in the 1960s and 1970s. Outside of Japan, the spread of Toyota and General Motors partnership called NUMMI began in California in 1984.

The concepts of just-in-time (JIT) and jidoka were created before the war. A long time ago, Sakichi Toyoda created the idea of jidoka, and he also started the Toyota group of companies. He added a machine to his looms that would stop the loom if a thread broke. This improved the quality of things and let people concentrate on more important tasks instead of just checking machines for quality. Over time, this basic idea became a part of every machine, every production line, and every Toyota operation.

Kiichiro Toyoda, who is the son of Sakichi and the founder of Toyota, came up with the idea of JIT (Just-in-Time) in the 1930s. He said Toyota should not have too many cars sitting unsold, and they should try to work with their suppliers to make the same number of cars all the time. Ohno was in charge of making JIT, a special system to control how much we make and to avoid making too much.

TPS was well-known after The Machine That Changed the World was published in 1990. This book took five years to make, and it was researched by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The researchers at MIT found that TPS was faster and more efficient than regular mass production. It was a very different way of doing things, so they called it lean production.