Tags: Implementing Toyota's 4Ps Guide

Can We Avoid Politics in Lean Transformation? Changing to lean is a political process. There, we said it. Everyone knows politics are bad, right? Politics is what happens in organizations that are not being run...

Where Should You Start? You know your company needs an injection of lean. There’s waste everywhere. Upon serious reflection, you pretty much failed most of the tests. The culture is nowhere near the level that...

Less Can Be More in Report Writing Problem solving is about thinking. But writing things down can help thinking. How can you document key information and decisions at each step in a way that you...

WE HAVE FINALLY reached the implementation phase! Many people are so anxious to “get busy” with implementation that they shortcut the previous portions of the process. This is a critical mistake! Without a clearly defined...

JUST AS THERE ARE many potential causes and root causes for any problem, there is always more than one way to solve any problem! The creativity of the problem solver is an important aspect of...

TOYOTA’S CORPORATE slogan is “Yoi shina, yoi kangai,” which means, “Good thinking, good products.” This applies particularly well to the analysis portion of problem solving. Toyota places high value on the ability to think logically...

Carefully Aim Before Firing In Toyota’s internal Toyota Way 2001 document they describe problem solving under the broad category genchi genbutsu—the actual part, the actual place. The discipline of carefully observing actual processes directly without...

More Than Solving Problems The Toyota Way seeks to identify and remove obstacles on the path to perfection. This philosophy is rooted in the Japanese cultural desire to seek perfection in every activity. As we...

Supplier Partners in a Globally Competitive World It’s a tough time to be talking about supplier “partnerships.” With companies throughout the Western world looking at the prices of parts from China, India, Vietnam, Russia, Eastern...

Companies working to learn from Toyota to build high performance supply systems seem to want to skip over the hard work of developing effective supplier partnerships, looking for easy solutions through supply chain software and...

What follows are the seven characteristics of Toyota’s supplier partnering, as described in Table 12-1. We’ll look at them from bottom to top and discuss the steps you would need to follow to bring each...

“We Don’t Just Build Cars, We Build People” In most areas of life, you get out of something what you put into it. This is especially true when it comes to your associates. If you...

Success Starts with Leadership When we begin to work with companies, they want us to tour their plants and see what they’ve done with lean. The story typically goes like this: “We started down our...

Back to the Abacus? “Lean is antitechnology.” “Those lean bigots are always bad-mouthing IT.” “If it were up to the lean dreamers we would scrap all our computers and even our pens are too high...

WE ARE FREQUENTLY asked, “What is it about the way Toyota does things that makes their quality consistently better than other car companies?” While there is no one simple answer to this question, it can...

The Toyota Way is full of paradoxes, and one of the most counterintuitive is the leveling paradox: that slow and steady can beat fast and jerky, like the parable of the tortoise and the hare...

Is Standardization Coercive? Standardized work evokes images of industrial engineers with stopwatches terrorizing the workforce by squeezing out every second of productivity. It brings to mind a highly regimented existence in which “big brother” is...

One-Piece Flow Is the Ideal Taiichi Ohno taught us that one-piece flow is the ideal. In school when you have the right answer for the test you get an A. The right answer is one-piece...

First Get to Basic Stability If you have not already been using lean methods and improving processes, in all likelihood your individual processes are unstable. Stability is defined as the capability to produce consistent results...

Lean Means Eliminating Waste Getting “lean” has become a corporate buzzword. A corporate executive hearing about the success of his competitors with a lean program might say to a subordinate, “We must get lean to...