Question

the authors have profiled the Toyota Production System (TPS) and its three core components:

• Continuous Improvement
• Respect for People
• Standard Work Practice

The chapter has also explained the following concepts:

• Just-in-Time Systems
• Lean Operations

In your own words, and with the help of the company’s website (www.tmmc.ca or www.toyota.ca), write a 2-3 page document explaining what you understand by these concepts, and how has Toyota used them to maintain an efficient manufacturing process, meet quality standards, empower its employees, satisfy customer needs, and help it to achieve competitive advantage.

Answer 1

Eiji Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno at the Toyota motor company in Japan pioneered the concept of Toyota Production System.

The Toyota motor corporation, by contrast, combines the advantages of craft and mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and the rigidity of the latter.

The basic idea of this system is to maintain a continuous flow of products in factories in order to flexibly adapt to demand changes. The realization of such production flow is called Just-in-time production.

Just-in-time basically means to produce the necessary units in the necessary quantities at the necessary time. Autonomation ("Jidoka" in Japanese) may be loosely interpreted as autonomous defects control. It supports Just-in-time by never allowing defective units from the preceding process to flow into and disrupt a subsequent process.

1. Quantity control, which enables the system to adapt to daily and monthly fluctuations in demand in terms of quantities and variety.

2. Quality assurance, which assures that each process will supply only good units to the subsequent processes.

3. Respect-for-humanity, which must be cultivated while the system utilises the human resource to attain its cost objectives.

Toyota’s slogan in manufacturing would be to produce in as small lots as possible with minimum cost as per market needs.

Flexible work force:

Workers should be trained to operate several machines, to perform maintenance tasks, and to perform quality inspections. In general, the attitude of respect for people leads to giving workers more responsibility for their own work.

Toyota Production System thus plays an important role, as it reduces the manufacturing time & wastage, during production. Thus it increases the amount of goods produced and decreases the cost of production of these goods.