Decoding the Dna of the Toyota Production System

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e Toyota Production System has long been hailed as the source of Toyota’s outstanding performance as a manufacturer. The system’s distinctive practices—its kanban cards and quality circles, for instance—have been widely introduced elsewhere. Indeed, following their own internal efforts to benchmark the world’s best manufacturing companies, GM, Ford, and Chrysler have independently created major initiatives to develop Toyota-like production systems. Companies that have tried to adopt the system can be found in fields as diverse as aerospace, consumer products, metals processing, and industrial products. What’s curious is that few manufacturers have managed to imitate Toyota successfully—even though the company has been extraordinarily open about its practices. Hundreds of thousands of executives from thousands of businesses have toured Toyota’s plants in Japan and the United States. Frustrated by their inability to replicate Toyota’s performance, many visitors assume that the secret of Toyota’s success must lie in its cultural roots. But that’s just not the case. Other Japanese companies, such as Nissan and Honda, have fallen short of Toyota’s standards, and Toyota has successfully introduced its production system all around the world, including in North America, where the company is this year building over a million cars, mini-vans, and light trucks. So why has it been so difficult to decode the Toyota Production System? The answer, we believe, is that observers confuse the tools and practices they see on their plant visits with the system itself. That makes it impossible for them to resolve an apparent paradox of the system—namely, that activities, connections, and production flows in a Toyota factory are rigidly scripted, yet at the same time Toyota’s operations are enormously flexible and adaptable. Activities and processes are constantly being challenged

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