Recommended by Anand Deshpande, Founder, Aadma Consulting, and S Badri Narayana, Director – Operations Excellence, FLAME TAO Knoware
Why to read ‘Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production’ By Taiichi Ohno; and ‘A Study of Toyota Production System from Industrial Engineering Point of View’ By Shigeo Shingo’?
Taiichi Ohno’s text combines his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota’s attempts at Lean production. In Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production, Ohno explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavour. This book helps understand TPS in detail as the concepts are clearly explained. The caution though is that they can be understood only if the reader has hands-on experience on the production floor. Shigeo’s interpretation of the TPS on the other hand focuses on understanding and exercising customer centricity to operations. It details on deep understanding of value adding activities and non-value adding activities by observing the Gemba (the real workplace) to bring in continuous improvement in lead times, defect rates, work place safety and ergonomics.
Excerpts: “The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises.” – Taiichi Ohno
“It is a mistake to try to merely imitate TPS. External features of the system can only be successfully applied based on a thorough understanding of the principles involved. The principle of increasing profit through eliminating waste must be embraced by management first, so that when the line needs to shut down to determine the root cause of problem, thereby eliminating that waste a second time, management will support the decision.” – Shigeo Shingo
