The Toyota Production System, also known as Lean Production and Lean Manufacturing, emerged in Japan, Toyota car factory, just after the Second World War. At this time Japanese industry had a very low productivity and a huge lack of resources, which naturally prevented adopt the model of mass production.

The system, due to three people: Toyota's founder and master of inventions, Sakichi Toyoda, Kiichiro Toyoda and his son chief engineer Taiichi Ohno. The system aims to increase production efficiency by eliminating solid waste.


The system of mass production developed by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford in the early twentieth century dominated the world until the 90s. Sought to reduce the unit costs of products through mass production, specialization and division of labor. However this system had to operate with lots of inventory and production high. At first there was great concern about the quality of the product.

In the Toyota Production System, the production batches are small, allowing a greater variety of products. Example: instead of producing a batch of 50 white sedans, it produces 10 batches of five cars each, with different colors and models. The workers are multifunctional, ie, know anything other than their own and know how to operate more than one machine. In the Toyota Production System, the concern about product quality is extreme. We developed several simple but extremely effective techniques to deliver the expected results, such as Kanban and Poka-Yoke.

According to Taiichi Ohno (1988):

Social values have changed. Now, we can not sell our products unless we place ourselves within the hearts of our consumers, each of which has different tastes and concepts. Today, the industrial world was forced to master the real production system manifold, in small quantities.


The underpinnings of the Toyota Production System is the absolute elimination of waste and the two pillars of support is necessary for the Just-in-time and autonomation.


The 7 wastes that the system seeks to eliminate:

Overproduction, the largest source of waste.
Waiting time refers to materials that are waiting in queues to be processed.
Transportation, never generate added value in the product.
Processing, a process some operations could not exist.
Stock, its reduction will occur through its root cause.
Drive
Defects, producing defective products means waste materials, manpower, material handling and other defects.
In

Lean Tools 1
2 Other features of the system LEAN
3 References
4 See also
5 External links 
 


LEAN Tools

To identify the problems: Workshops, Value Stream Management vision.
To identify the root-causes of problems: Workshops, Value Stream Management, visual, 5 whys, Ishikawa diagram.
To solve the problems: Deployment of strategic objectives (kanri Oshin), Visual Management.
Founded in 1998 as the second institute in the world to be created with the intention of spreading the Lean System, Lean Institute Brazil (LIB) operates in Brazil following the example of the American Institute, Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), founded in 1997 by James Womack. One of the main roles of the Lean Enterprise Institute is researching the Lean tools and adapt them to the contexts of Brazilian companies, thereby assisting in the implementation of Lean within the most diverse sectors.

It is common for companies to begin its journey through the Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to just learn to see waste of their productive systems and locating the most critical points and devise an improved flow. Then it is customary to consider the creation of Streaming Flow or a piece (One piece flow) for reducing waste between adjacent processes, line balancing and reduction of lead time. The result of implementing the lean system usually also incorporate the culture of Level Pull, which consolidates the production logic connecting the production order to real customer need, producing only what is actually consumed.

Other features of the system LEAN

It's a bottom-up approach. The employee involvement is crucial to the success of LEAN projects, because they know best processes.
It's a cycle that never ends, an approach of continuous improvement.
The process of ideas generation, feasibility, implementation is not LEAN. LEAN projects in the working groups are guided by the seven wastes mentioned above.
Acts in terms of processes, attitudes and behavior and management tools.
The Toyota Production System has been implemented in various companies around the world, but not always with great success. The difficulty lies in the cultural aspect. An entire philosophical and historical heritage provide a uniqueness to the Japanese model.

According to an article in Newsweek International in 2005, Toyota Motors Company achieved record profits of $ 11 billion, surpassing the earnings of GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler combined.

In 2007 Toyota became the world's largest automobile company, a fact that was only scheduled for 2008.