I just returned from a couple of days in Monterrey Mexico helping a couple of friends. As part of a broader government initiative to improve the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises a conference was held to help communicate and spur interest in lean manufacturing methods.The entity charged with spearheading the effort is “CCM” (CENTRO DE COMPETITIVIDAD DE MONTERREY) a leader in the implementation of lean principles.
I gave a short one hour speech and multiple companies with strong track records in lean presented and gave tours of their operations. Here are a few pictures from the conference and a link to the presentation (click here). The thrust of the presentation centered around some things companies could get started to do base off of Toyota’s history when it was a small company and starting to improve its competitiveness.
Conference Pictures
Conference Program
I did some digging around a couple of years ago to learn more about the history of set up reduction efforts at Toyota. A man named Katsuya Jibiki was the first team leader at Toyota to be in charge of set up reduction efforts in production in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. He rose to become a general manager of the press shops in Toyota and the retired from the company. As is often the case the reality around set up reduction is far more interesting than the propoganda you often read.
For starters here is the extent of the set up reduction gains made over a couple of decades. From a 2-3 hour average in the 1950’s Toyota went down to a 3 minute average in 1973. (Note: not all machines were capable of this standard since it is just an average as I will show later). Continue reading Set Up Reduction in Toyota
I recently wrote a guest article with Tom Harada for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers for the May edition of their magazine. Here is a link to the article as printed by SME.
SME Article Link (Click Here)
The first draft of the article was slightly different however including some pictures I took at the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology. Unfortunately the image resolution of the pictures was not good enough to include them in the article. I’ll post the original article below with the images as well. Continue reading Lean Lives on the Shop Floor
The following pictures are from an e-mail sent to me some time ago by my friend John Shook. John visited a Toyota Museum Library and found the translated copies of our books on the shelf. It is a pretty funny feeling to have worked for Toyota in Japan and also find a copy of your own book in their library. Of course no one in manufacturing at Toyota is using either my book or John’s for that matter. We wrote the contents for people outside of Toyota who were interested in some of the concepts. Still it was a nice feeling to see the books in the library. Thanks John for the update! Continue reading Creating Level Pull at Toyota Museum
Here is an interesting example of Kaizen back in the machine shops of Toyota in the 1950’s. TPS originated in the machine shops of Toyota under the direction of manager Taiichi Ohno. “Ohno” style production lines were created in the engine plant in line with his concepts and thoughts on improvement. Unfortunately not many pictures exist from the time period. Here is one example though of a before and after image from a line conversion. Continue reading Ohno Line Conversion / Toyota Kaizen Example
Quality control has a long history within both Toyoda the parent loom company and Toyota the automotive manufacturing company. Sakichi Toyoda started making looms in the late 1890’s. His work culminated in the impressive 1924 Type G Auto Loom (click for image of sample machines).
The Type G loom was noted for its non stop shuttle change and the concept of “Jidoka” or built in quality. The machine would stop when a thread broke helping to ensure 100% quality in the product. Manufacture of the loom however was still mainly driven by inspection and use of various gauges and measuring devices. Continue reading Toyota Control Chart 1950’s Example
Here is a detailed example of what a QC Circle activity looks like in Toyota these days. The following link will take you over to the blog part of the A3Thinking.com website I set up with Professor Durward Sobek. Inside the link is a 24 slide presentation that won a plant level award in a QC Circle competition a year or two ago inside Toyota.
Toyota QC Circle Activity Presentation
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