Sunday, July 18, 2010

The Toyota Way - Underlying Principles of the Toyota Production System

The underlying principles of the Toyota Production System have been called the Toyota Way. These principles revolutionized the manufacturing industry and helped develop Toyota into the company it is today.

The Toyota Way has been outlined by Toyota as continuous improvement, and respect for people. Continuous improvement encompasses challenge, kaizen and genchi genbutsu. Challenge means forming a long term vision and meeting challenges with courage and creativity to realize dreams. Kaizen is improving business operations continuously and always striving for innovation and evolution. Genchi genbutsu is going to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions. Respect for people encompasses respect and teamwork. Respect is for respecting others, making efforts to understand each other, take responsibility and doing the best to build mutual trust. Teamwork is stimulating personal and professional growth, share the opportunities of development and maximize individual and team performance.

Outside observers of Toyota and summarized the Toyota Way principles a little differently. They see the Toyota Way as basing management decisions on long term philosophy even at the expense of short term financial goals, the right process will produce the right results, add value to the organization by developing your people and partners, continuously solving root problems drives organizational learning.

The right process encompasses creating continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface, use the pull system to avoid overproduction, level out the workload, build a culture of stopping to fix problems to get quality right from the first, standardized tasks are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment, using visual control so no problems are hidden and using only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.

Adding value to the organization encompasses growing leaders that thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy and teach it to others, developing exceptional people and teams that follow your company's philosophy and respecting your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.

The principle of continuously solving root problems encompasses seeing for yourself to thoroughly understand a situation, making decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options and implementing decisions rapidly, and becoming a learning organization through relentless reflection and continuous improvement.

Instead of people resigning themselves to problems, becoming hostage to routine and no problem solving, the Toyota Way goes back to the basics exposing the real significance of problems and making fundamental improvements. This can be seen in the Toyota Production System.

Drive a piece of this inventive and ingenious company by visiting Iowa City Toyota at Billion Auto.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christine_M._Breen

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2 comments:

winter park used car said...

Its a good step of Toyota . I think it help the developing .

Liza Mellin said...

Looking at how the company shows their continuous improvement as time goes by, you can say that their principles for their employees in pursuing excellence works well on a global level. You know, if there are a lot of companies that uses this principle, it's sure that the chances for success will be higher than ever!