Lean started way before Toyota!
Now, another common misconception amongst my clients is that ‘Lean’ and efficiency improvements all started with Toyota – wrong. Here is a very brief history of how it all came about and some would argue it started even before this!
Lean Six Sigma Overview - Lean Manufacturing
In 1910 Charles Sorensen and Henry Ford created the first moving assembly line as a way of reducing wasted motion and handling complexity in automotive assembly. Without question, the Lean system pioneered by the Toyota Motor Company has a common beginning with these early 'work flow' improvements. However, this common heritage led to two very different manufacturing systems: mass production and Lean production.
The objective of mass production is to maximise economies of scale through high capital utilisation. At Ford, the emphasis on flow was limited almost exclusively to the final assembly line, while subassembly processes, suppliers and distribution operated on almost independent production schedules, resulting in large batch sizes and high inventory levels. Inventory at all points was accepted as a necessary buffer to survive schedule and output instability. Quality was inspected and projected into the system through mass inspection and inventory buffers. Capital was a solution to the relentless push for capacity.
Finally, production was driven from forecasts, pushing material through the plant in anticipation of actual customer demand. The mass production system flourished in the high growth, boom phase of the automotive industry and was widely copied in other sectors.
The objective of Lean production is the elimination of waste through the efficient use of all resources. In 1945 the president of Toyota Motor Company issued an edict to the company to catch up with American three years otherwise the automotive industry of Japan would not survive. At the time, labour productivity in Japanese factories was 1/10 that of US automotive manufacturers. Scarce capital and small, highly diverse ?island? market did not support large-scale, mass production. Finding a solution to the challenge led to a fundamentally different 'Lean Production' system, which ultimately triumphed over mass production during the 1973-4 oil crisis. At a time of global recession and slow growth, Toyota sustained profits and grew US market share while US companies lost on both counts.
Mostly retired Continuous Process Improvement consultant with strong people skills and IT skills. Available for occasional short and part time engagements.
9 年Perhaps a better title for the article would be "Process improvement started before Toyota", since it does not name any company doing Lean before Toyota. No one did Lean before Toyota because the term Lean, a methodology for reducing waste was coined in the 1980's as a result of an MIT study of auto manufacturers around the world, by Womack, Jones and Roos in a book called "The Machine That Changed the World." The commonly held belief is that process improvement started with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 1900s when he studied masons laying brick and reduced their process from 17 steps to 4 or 5 and published “Scientific Management”. Toyota uses the Toyota Production System, which it developed after Ejii Toyoda visited Ford's Rouge River plant in the early 1950's to learn how Ford built cars. He came back with many reasons why Ford's mass production would not work for Toyota, all of which are explained in Womack’s book. Taichi Ohno, along with others in the Toyoda family, designed the TPS system specifically to minimize the time between the order for a vehicle and its delivery to the customer. TPS improved on the mass production process, with its hidden factories, large inventories, worker dissatisfaction, overall poor quality and other sins and was originally built on the principles of automation with a human face and just in time manufacturing, as currently described at https://www.toyota-global.com/company/vision_philosophy/toyota_production_system/.
Cimetech - Manufacturing Profit Optimization Engineer. Manufacturing & Financial Mathematician. Applied Research in Manufacturing.
9 年One of the first organized manufacturing is probably the Arsenal of Venice. During the sixteenth century, they were making 3 ships a day. See the book "Optimized Factory Performance" wrote by James P. Ignizio. Mr. Ignizio described very well the history of manufacturing ( chap. 2).
Director of Finance @ SDS Rx | MBA
9 年I believe it actually goes much further back than this. If you read "The Wealth of Nations", 1776, Adam Smith distinctly describes the efficiency increases obtained through the division of labor to mass produce common items such as pins. He explains how a group of individual each focused on a singular task in the process can create efficiency increases upwards of 10,000% over a single individual who works separately and independently. The manufacturer broke the process down to the basest of level training each individual on one or two base tasks in the pin-making process and had them focus entirely on those tasks so that the whole process was broken down into 18 distinct operations in an assembly line fashion. Book I, Chapter 1,' Of the Division of Labour'