Hey everyone. Welcome to this lecture, a brief snippet of Ono's journey to build the Toyota Production System. This lecture though brief, will introduce you to how the famous Toyota Production System came into existence. Let's begin. In the 1950s, Eg Toyoda, and his managers of Toyota Motor Corporation took their 12 week study tour of us plants. As they returned, Eg Toyota gave an assignment to ono to focus on improving Toyota manufacturing within the protected Japanese market.
This was a daunting task. Toyota Motor Company struggled through the 1930s even before World War Two, Toyota realized that the Japanese market was too small and demand too fragmented to support the high pressure volumes in the US. Toyota managers knew that if they were to survive in the long run, they would have to adapt the mass production approach for the Japanese market. But How on earth did what any good manager would have done in this situation? He benchmarked the competition through further visits to the US. He also studied Forbes book today and tomorrow.
After all, one of the major components that Ono believed Toyota needed to master was continuous flow. And the best example of that, at the time was Ford's moving assembly line. He borrowed an important idea of the pool system, which was inspired by supermarkets. In any well run supermarket. individual items are replenished as each item begins to run low on the shelf that is material replenishment. is initiated by consumption.
To initiate the poll at every step of every manufacturing process, Ohio and his team implemented Kanban to signal to the previous step when its parts needed to be replenished. This resulted in elimination of inventory. Thus, the concept of just in time was evolved. It became one of the key pillars of the Toyota Production System. The second pillar was jidoka. That owner had learned before he was transferred to Toyota Motor Company from Toyota spinning and weaving.
This concept was the brainchild of sakichi Toyoda. The other critical principle that Ono and his team implemented was Kaizen or continuous improvement. It was based on Deming systematic approach to problem solving, known as the Deming cycle or plan. Do Check act PDCA cycle. When owner and his team emerged from the shop floor with a new manufacturing system, it wasn't just for one company in a particular market and culture. What they had created was a new paradigm in manufacturing or service delivery, a new way of seeing, understanding and interpreting what is happening in a production process that could propel them beyond the mass production system.
That was the Toyota Production System. With that understanding of TPS and how it came into existence, it is time to understand the Toyota V, which is the over arching philosophy that governs the Toyota Production System. Thank you for attending this lecture. See you in the next one.