TPS & Toyota

An internal Toyota textbook on the Toyota Production System compiled by the company’s Education Department in January 1973 (Showa 48). The preface, written by Taiichi Ohno, recalls Kiichiro Toyoda’s dictum that parts should come to the assembly line just in time and defines the system as activities to raise productivity and reduce cost through thorough elimination of waste. Chapters cover the Toyota method of man-hour reduction, efficiency, standardized work, and the kanban system, with an appendix on the evolution of machine layout and work methods.

An introductory handbook written by Art Smalley in 1996 that presents key concepts of the Toyota Production System in summary form. It opens with a brief history of TPS and the goals of the system, then covers the two pillars, respect for people, jidoka, standardization, just in time, pull production, kanban, level production, takt time, flow production, and equipment reliability, closing with a glossary of terms.

A translation of a 1985 Nihon Keizai Shimbun article by Eiji Toyoda titled The Roots of TPS, translated with historical commentary by Art Smalley. Eiji describes Kiichiro Toyoda’s 1937 introduction of flow production and the phrase just-in-time at the Koromo plant, including the thick manual he calls the actual roots of the Toyota Production System. The commentary corrects common origin anecdotes, credits acknowledged outside influences, and closes with a Japanese-language reading list on TPS history.

The text of a keynote address by Mikio Kitano, then President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, at the University of Kentucky Lean Manufacturing Conference in May 1997. Kitano presents TPS as common sense expressed through one-by-one confirmation and doing it right the first time, illustrated with Kiichiro Toyoda’s 1930s engine and truck experience. He maps the three Ms to practice: avoiding muri through standardized work, avoiding mura through just-in-time, and discovering muda as management’s responsibility.

A first-person account by Isao Kato, retired manager of training and development at Toyota, who organized Shigeo Shingo’s training visits from 1960 to the mid 1980s. It documents the four versions of the P-course with day-by-day outlines, states the course was taught about 80 times to roughly 30 people per session, and clarifies that Shingo was a valued outside instructor who did not develop JIT, jidoka, kanban, or standardized work.

An adaptation of Art Smalley’s speaker’s notes from the April 2006 Shingo Prize Conference, given at his induction as a life member of the Shingo Prize Academy. It argues that lean implementation overweights the just-in-time pillar and neglects jidoka, equipment reliability, and process-level improvement, and describes what Shingo actually did at Toyota: teaching the P-course about 80 times over two decades and training over 3,000 people in industrial engineering analysis and the scientific method.

A research essay by Art Smalley examining competing origins of set-up reduction in manufacturing and arguing there is no single inventor. It works through candidate cases in historical order, from Sakichi Toyoda’s G-Type loom and Ohno-era machine shops to Danly quick die change presses, Toyota press shop kaizen, a Toyota do Brasil forging shop, Shigeo Shingo’s SMED, and parallel work at Nissan, drawing on interviews with five retired Toyota managers.

An essay by Art Smalley contrasting a Toyota engine plant in West Virginia with typical North American lean transformations. The plant has no value stream maps, change agents, or U-shaped cells, yet delivers award-winning performance. The article argues TPS is about profit, cost consciousness, and problem solving rather than tool deployment, explains the origin of value stream mapping as Toyota’s material and information flow analysis, and stresses supervisor development through TWI.

The 1977 International Journal of Production Research paper by four members of Toyota’s Production Control Department, the first major academic description of the Toyota Production System and kanban system in English. It presents cost reduction through waste elimination and full use of workers’ capabilities as the two basic concepts, and explains just-in-time production, withdrawal by subsequent processes, production leveling, jidoka, and the respect-for-human system, including the kanban quantity equation.

A Management Services magazine article by Art Smalley arguing that many lean efforts stall because operations lack basic stability: predictable manpower, machines, materials, and methods. It recounts Toyota’s own early struggles in the 1950s from retired-executive recollections, gives four diagnostic questions for whether an operation is stable enough to pursue flow, and walks through achieving stability in each of the 4Ms.

A practitioner article by Art Smalley, published in Assembly Magazine, on connecting assembly operations to upstream batch processes such as stamping, molding, paint, and machining using replenishment pull with signal kanban. It explains three approaches: pattern production, lot making with a batch board, and triangle kanban, with pros and cons of each, plus a seven-step worked example for sizing lot sizes and trigger points in a machining department.

A Lean Enterprise Institute case study of Delphi Steering’s Plant 1 in Saginaw, Michigan, which used basic stability work to cure chronic machine downtime after opening in 2004. It describes Pareto analysis of andon data, tool crib reorganization, week-long machine kaizen workshops initially led by retired Toyota veteran Tom Harada, TPM basics, and twice-daily performance board walks, with on-time shipping rising from 35 percent to 100 percent in a year.