Lean Operations and the

Toyota Production System

Saurabh Chandra

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Toyota Production System (TPS)
introduction:
• Toyota is frequently associated with high quality and overall
operational excellence.
• Enjoyed decades of financial success while changing the history of
OM
• Various elements of TPS are intertwined, thereby making it difficult to
adapt to some elements while not adapting others
• Due to its focus on eliminating waste, (parts of) TPS are often referred
to as “Lean Operations”.

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The history of Toyota:
Ford:
• Henry Ford pioneered the use of assembly line
• Model T:
• First mass produced vehicle - using interchangeable parts
• Interchangeable parts allowed standardization of assembly tasks:
• Dramatically reduced variability, increasing quality
• Streamlined production process, making assembly tasks faster
• Goal of the production process - maximizing equipment utilization (?)

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History of Toyota:
Toyota Motor Corporation:
• Grew out of Toyota industries, manufacturer of automated looms
• Supplied highly simplistic trucks to Japanese army during WWII
• Post war: negligible domestic market for automobiles and little cash for high-
end equipment acquisition
• Mass production- scale economics and large investments in machinery not a viable
option
• A system with various elements evolved over a long term leading to the TPS
• TPS enabled development of Toyota as the most successful automaker of the
world and gold standard for Operations Management

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 Comparison of Toyota, GM and Ford

Sales Volume (in 1000)

Stock Price in US$

1985 1988 2000 2006

• Toyota had 2006 profits of $13.6 billion and employed over 300,000 people worldwide
• Created substantial economic value as measured by the returns to its shareholders
“Smart operations do pay off!”

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TPS
framework:
1
- Zero Waste
- JIT and Quality
Management
act as support 2 3
pillars
- Foundations
methods act as 4
enablers
- No “Buffer or 5
Suffer” paradox
6

7
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Elements of Lean
Production System
The IMVP study (1980)
• Results of a global benchmarking of automotive parts
• Comparison of Asian, European, and North American plants in terms of quality
and productivity

The difference in productivity is accounted for by all the things that GM did that did
not contribute to the production of the vehicle: non-value added activities (MUDA)
• Notes: Gross assembly hours per car arc calculated by dividing total hours of effort in the plant by the total number of cars
produced.
• Defects per car were estimated from the JD Power Initial Quality Survey for 1 987.
• Assembly Space per Car is square feet per vehicle per year, corrected for vehicle size.
• Inventories of Parts are a rough average for major parts.
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Is it easy for a firm to replicate
another firm, known for high
quality like Toyota? Why or why
not?

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Wastes in production

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11
The seven sources of waste
• Overproduction
• Producing too much too soon
• additional wastage in terms of material handling, storage and transportation
• Produce only what the consumer wants and when the customer wants
• Waiting
• Two types of waiting: resource waiting for the flow units and flow units waiting
for a resource
• Transport
• Internal transportation
• Physical layout of a process reflects the process flow to minimize the distances
flow units travel through a process
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The seven sources of waste
• Over-processing
• Workers spending more time on a flow unit than necessary
• Inventory
• long information turnaround times
• Inventory as a non-value adding activity is closely related to overproduction
• Indicated JIT methods not yet implemented correctly
• it often hides other problems in the process
• Rework
• Do it right the first time
• Rework increases variability and consumes capacity from resources
• Motion
• Only one right way to perform a particular task
• Every task to be carefully analyzed and optimized using a set of tools, ergonomics.

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Is it theoretically or practically possible to have literally zero inventory
in your production process?
Try to explain using the very famous Little’s Law in OM.

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Objective of waste reduction:
To maximize the percentage of time a resource is engaged in
value-adding activity by reducing the non-value-added
(wasteful) activities as much as possible
The objective of zero waste:
• The stated target is Zero defects and Zero inventory
• Its an ideological objective not a numerical one
• Little’s Law: Inventory = Flow Rate * Flow Time
• To achieve zero inventory level
• Produce at the speed to light or
• Produce at zero flow rate
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Advantages of waste reduction:
• One can perform the same work at lower cost
• For a capacity constrained resource waste reduction is a way to
increase output and hence revenue

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) framework:

• Used by McKinsey and other consulting firms
• Objective is to identify what percentage of a resource’s time is true,
value added time and what percentage is wasted
• Provides a good estimate for the potential for process improvement
before engaging in waste reduction
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The Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Framework:

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JIT: Matching Supply with Demand
• The goal is to create a supply process that forms a smooth flow with
its demand
• Thereby giving customers exactly what they need, when they need it.

Three steps towards achieving JIT process:

1. Achieve one-unit-at-a-time flow
2. Produce at the rate of consumer demand
3. Implement Pull Systems

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Achieve One-Unit-at-a-Time Flow

• Batches in Production scheduling:

• Escalator vs. an Elevator
• Reduction in set up times makes small batches economically possible
• Production plans are designed to avoid large batches of the same variant.
• Instead production variants are mixed together on the assembly line
• Mixed model production (Heijunka)
What if there are large distances between successive stations?
• Create a physical layout for our resources that closely mirrors the process flow
• Two resources that are close to each other in the process flow diagram also should be
co-located in physical space.
• Avoids unnecessary transports and reduces the need to form transport batches.
• Flow units can flow one unit at a time from one resource to the next (ikko-nagashi).

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Produce at the Rate of Customer demand
• TPS aims at reducing finished goods inventory by operating its
production process in synchronization with customer orders.
• This is true for both the overall number of vehicles produced as well
as with respect to the mix of vehicles across various models.
• We translate customer demand into production rate (flow rate) using
the concept of takt time.
• Derived from the German word takt, which stands for "tact" or "clock."
• Just like an orchestra needs to follow a common tact imposed by the
conductor, a JIT process should follow the tact imposed by demand.

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MIX MODEL
SEQUENCING

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Implement Pull Systems
• Inventory not only exists at the finished goods level, but also throughout
the process (work-in-process inventory).
• Some parts of the process are likely to be worker paced with some
(hopefully modest) amount of inventory between resources.
• We now have to design a coordination system that coordinates these
resources by controlling the amount of inventory in the process.
• We do this by implementing a pull system.
• The resource furthest downstream (i.e., closest to the market) is paced by market
demand.
• It also relays the demand information to the next station upstream, thus ensuring
that the upstream resource also is paced by demand.
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Implement Pull Systems
TPS advocates two forms of process control:
• In kanban-based pull, the upstream replenishes what demand has
withdrawn from the downstream.
• Make-to-order refers to the release of work into a system only when a
customer order has been received for that unit.

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Kanban system:

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KANBAN CARD

27
ORIGIN OF KANBAN
Determining Number of Kanbans
average demand during lead time + safety stock
No. of Kanbans =
container size

dL + S
N =
where C

N = number of kanbans or containers

d = average demand over some time period
L = lead time to replenish an order
S = safety stock
C = container size
Make to Order system
• We also can implement a pull system using a make-to-order process.
• Resources in such a process only operate after having received an
explicit customer order.
• Typically, the products corresponding to these orders then flow
through the process on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis.
• Each flow unit in the make-to-order process is thereby explicitly
assigned to one specific customer order.

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Which form of a pull system one wants to
implement:
• Kanban should be used for products or parts
(a) That are processed in high volume and limited variety
(b) That are required with a short lead time so that it makes economic sense to
have a limited number of them (as many as we have kanban cards) pre-
produced, and
(c) For which the costs and efforts related to storing the components are low.
• Make-to-order should be used when
(a) Products or parts are processed in low volume and high variety
(b) Customers are willing to wait for their order, and
(c) It is expensive or difficult to store the flow units.

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Quality Management
• If we operate with no buffers and want to avoid the waste of rework,
operating at zero defects is a must.
• TPS relies on defect prevention, rapid defect detection, and a strong worker
responsibility with respect to quality.
• Poka-Yoke or “fool-proofing” in operations
• Components are designed in a way that there exists one single way of
assembling them.
• Quick discovery and isolation of a defect
• Jidoka: stop process immediately as whenever defect is detected
Andon cord – a cord running adjacent to assembly lines enabling workers to
stop production is they detect a defect.
• Jidoka mutually strengthens zero inventory principle.
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 Information Turnaround time and its relation with buffer size:

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Quality Management
• In TPS, "the next step is the customer"
• Quality inspection is "built in" (tsukurikomi) and happens at every
step in the line

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Exposing problems through inventory reduction:

• We want to reduce inventory to expose defects and fix the underlying root cause of the defect
• In a kanban system, the number of kanban cards-and hence the amount of inventory in the process-is
under managerial control.
• So we can use the kanban system to gradually reduce inventory and thereby expose quality problems.
• The kanban system and its approach to buffers can be illustrated with the following metaphor.
• Consider a boat sailing on a canal that has numerous rocks in it.
• Despite potential short-term losses in throughput, the advantage of this approach is that it moves the
process to a better frontier

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Flow rate and inventory levels:

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Flexibility:
• To adjust to fluctuations in demand from the end market, TPS
attempts to create processes with sufficient flexibility
• Since forecasts are more reliable at the aggregate level, TPS requests
workers to be skilled in handling multiple machines

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Flexibility contd.
• This requires that the operators are skilled in multiple assembly tasks.
• Good training, job rotation, skill-based payment, and well-documented standard operating
procedures are essential requirements for this.
• A multitiered workforce consisting of highly skilled full-time employees and a pool of
temporary workers that can be called upon when demand is high.
• Such multitask flexibility of workers also can help decrease idle time in cases of activities that
require some worker involvement but are otherwise largely automated.
• In these cases, a worker can load one machine and while this machine operates, the worker-
instead of being idle-operates another machine along the process flow (takotei-mochi).
• This is facilitated if the process flow is arranged in a U-shaped manner, in which case a
worker can share tasks not only with the upstream and the downstream resource, but also
with another set of tasks in the process.

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Standardization of work and reduction of variability
• Variability is a key inhibitor in an attempt to smooth flow.
• In the presence of variability:
• Buffer or Suffer
• A JIT system needs to be stable due to inherent vulnerabilities in an un-buffered process
• Taiwanese earthquake 1999
• Also, variability occurs because of quality defects or because of differences in activity times for the
same or for different operators.

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Human Resource practices:
• 8th waste in TPS: Waste of Human Intellect
• Slogan: “In our company we have two jobs: (1) to do our jobs and (2)
to improve it”
“Only by drawing on the combined brainpower of all its employees can
a firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today’s
environment”
Konosuka Matsusita, Ex-chairman, Panasonic; in response of Taylor’s
proposition

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HR practises contd.
• Quality circles
• Kaizen
• Data driven problem solving follows a standardized process:
• Control charts
• Fishbone diagrams
• Five Whys?
• Other problem solving tools
• Not only we standardize the production process, we also standardize
the process of improvement

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Lean Transformation:
• There is more to a successful turnaround than the application of a set of tools
• McKinsey refers to the set of activities required to improve operations of a
client as lean transformation
• Three aspects of lean transformation:
• The operating system
• Process management aspects
• Flow, matching supply with demand, controlling variability, etc.
• A management infrastructure
• Performance management
• Mind-sets and behaviours of employees
• Change management

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