Monday, November 02, 2009

Summary of the 14 Toyota Way Principles (Part 1)

Section I: Long-Term Philosophy

Principle 1. Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

  • Have a philosophical sense of purpose that supersedes any short-term decision making. Work, grow, and align the whole organization toward a common purpose that is bigger than making money. Understand your place in the history of the company and work to bring the company to the next level. Your philosophical mission is the foundation for all the other principles.
  • Generate value for the customer, society, and the economy—it is your starting point. Evaluate every function in the company in terms of its ability to achieve this.
  • Be responsible. Strive to decide your own fate. Act with self-reliance and trust in your own abilities. Accept responsibility for your conduct and maintain and improve the skills that enable you to produce added value.

Section II: The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results

Principle 2. Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.
  • Redesign work processes to achieve high value-added, continuous flow. Strive to cut back to zero the amount of time that any work project is sitting idle or waiting for someone to work on it.
  • Create flow to move material and information fast as well as to link processes and people together so that problems surface right away.
  • Make flow evident throughout your organizational culture. It is the key to a true continuous improvement process and to developing people.
Principle 3. Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction.
  • Provide your downline customers in the production process with what they want, when they want it, and in the amount they want. Material replenishment initiated by consumption is the basic principle of just-intime.
  • Minimize your work in process and warehousing of inventory by stocking small amounts of each product and frequently restocking based on what the customer actually takes away.
  • Be responsive to the day-by-day shifts in customer demand rather than relying on computer schedules and systems to track wasteful inventory.

Principle 4. Level out the workload (heijunka). (Work like the tortoise, not
the hare.)
  • Eliminating waste is just one-third of the equation for making lean successful. Eliminating overburden to people and equipment and eliminating unevenness in the production schedule are just as important—yet generally not understood at companies attempting to implement lean principles.
  • Work to level out the workload of all manufacturing and service processes as an alternative to the stop/start approach of working on projects in batches that is typical at most companies.

Principle 5. Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.
  • Quality for the customer drives your value proposition.
  • Use all the modern quality assurance methods available.
  • Build into your equipment the capability of detecting problems and
  • stopping itself. Develop a visual system to alert team or project leaders that a machine or process needs assistance. Jidoka (machines with human intelligence) is the foundation for “building in” quality.
  • Build into your organization support systems to quickly solve problems and put in place countermeasures.
  • Build into your culture the philosophy of stopping or slowing down to get quality right the first time to enhance productivity in the long run.
Principle 6. Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.
  • Use stable, repeatable methods everywhere to maintain the predictability, regular timing, and regular output of your processes. It is the foundation for flow and pull.
  • Capture the accumulated learning about a process up to a point in time by standardizing today’s best practices. Allow creative and individual expression to improve upon the standard; then incorporate it into the new standard so that when a person moves on you can hand off the learning to the next person.
Principle 7. Use visual control so no problems are hidden.
  • Use simple visual indicators to help people determine immediately whether they are in a standard condition or deviating from it.
  • Avoid using a computer screen when it moves the worker’s focus away from the workplace.
  • Design simple visual systems at the place where the work is done, to support flow and pull.
  • Reduce your reports to one piece of paper whenever possible, even for your most important financial decisions.



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