Sep 21 2020
As part of a discussion started by Lance Richardson on LinkedIn, I stated as a fact that SPC was not part of the Toyota Production System (TPS), which prompted several contradictors to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about. The “evidence” they provided, however, does not refute my statement. It confirms it instead.
Jun 17 2019
“TPS can be applied to any setting, as long as you can define your customer and product…” – Darren Migita MD– Seattle Children’s
Quoted by Jun Nakamuro on LinkedIn from a podcast.
Michel Baudin‘s comments: To be fair, Dr. Migita is a pediatrician with 20 years of experience. His podcast is about adapting TPS to health care, not to “any setting.” It is an interview, a format that can trip up anybody.
What I find remarkable throughout is that Migita does not hide behind the word “Lean.” He explicitly refers to Toyota and Taiichi Ohno and vigorously asserts that you can borrow ideas for car making to improve patient care.
This opening sentence in Jun Nakamuro’s quote, however, makes TPS sound like Shimmer, the product once advertised on Saturday Night Live as “both a dessert topping and a floor wax.” It almost kept me from listening further.
Mar 31 2019
There is a lesson that manufacturing leaders seem determined to learn the hard way: flooding factories with new technology does not improve their performance.
Roger Smith learned it at GM in the 1980s. Elon Musk, for all his other achievements, admitted by tweet to making the same mistake at Tesla last year.
To really improve manufacturing performance, you start with, as Crispin Vincenti-Brown put it, with “what happens when the guy picks up the wrench.” You work with that person to make the work easier, faster, safer, and less prone to deviations and errors. In doing this, you apply, as needed, technology you can afford that operators can work with.
This is hard work but it pays off. It is a key lesson learned from Toyota, TPS, and many companies that implemented it under the “Lean” label. But it’s an eat-your-vegetables message. The lure of a technological shortcut is irresistible.
Oct 12 2018
“For a company in Chesterfield, Mo., it involved something as seemingly simple as attaching a trash can to an employee’s chair. For one in St. Louis, it meant leaving the cover off an electronic temperature controller. For others it’s meant gathering employees from the chief executive on down for what’s known as Kaizen events — based on the Japanese word for continuing improvement. What do these seemingly unconnected efforts have in common? They are approaches to what is known as lean manufacturing — or, more recently, lean production — aimed at streamlining production processes, enhancing employee engagement and increasing profits.”
Source: The New York Times(10/11/2018)
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Thanks to Kevin Hop for drawing my attention to this article. Like him, I do read The New York Times regularly and usually appreciate the quality of its reporting. This article, however, does not measure up. It reflects the conventional wisdom on Lean manufacturing which, if anything, explains why so many implementations fail.
Aug 14 2018
I shared the BOM rap post with the TPS Principles and Practices group on LinkedIn, in order to tap into the TPS knowledge in this group, and this is what I learned from Todd McCann, Carey Boggess, Jeff Merriss, Hein Winkelaar, and Gary D. Stewart.
My thanks to all for their valuable input on the control of BOMs within Toyota and the uses BOM data is put to. What these responses did not address, however, is the information model for the BOMs, including what items are in and how BOMs are structured at Toyota, as opposed to other companies.
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Sep 26 2020
More about Toyota and SPC
The post on Does Toyota Use SPC? elicited many comments on LinkedIn. Some suggested that it was scoping SPC too narrowly when contrasting it with Toyota’s approach. In fact, SPC as referenced in the post is the body of knowledge described in the American literature on quality and taught in professional courses.
As to why Toyota is not using SPC, the answer is simple: SPC is about process capability and the quality problems Toyota addresses in 2020 are not due to lack of process capability. In industries that lack process capability, modern data science outguns the old SPC toolkit but that is a different discussion. The most vital question raised in the comments was why we have been not learning Toyota’s approach to quality. In the past 30 years, American industry has learned “Lean Six Sigma” instead.
The comments also enriched the public sources of information cited in the post with corroboration by current and former employees of Toyota.
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By Michel Baudin • Data science • 13 • Tags: ASQ, JUSE, SPC, Toyota, TPS