It was mainly Taiichi Ohno who thought and created their production system and philosophy, not Toyoda.

Ah. I was always under the impression that it was Toyoda.

Thanks for the correction!

It was , as all big achievements, a team effort. And apparently Ohno is getting not that much of coverage in internal Toyota documents and history. He also did seem to be the nicest of persons. He absolutely was one of the drivers during the early days of TPS.

Who learned the Toyota/Toyoda way from Sakichi Toyoda.

https://www.toyota-industries.com/company/history/toyoda_sak...

My father worked for a defense manufacturer making airplanes and other stuff. One of his first projects was scheduling parts for manufacturing in the late 80s.

They joked at the time they used JIC (just in case) because they had so many random parts with no method to the madness. The scheduler worked out and they were able to move it off some high performance IBM (or similar) computer onto a PC that didn’t require a specialized IBM tech or support contract, written in C.

I wonder if Deming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Japan) contributed to the Toyota Way? A lot of the Toyota Way seems inspired by his teachings.

I believe so.

He is almost revered, in Japan.

I'm told he was laughed out of the US, which is why he set up shop in Japan.

Now you imagine, how good do your ideas have to be an American coming to Japan just after World War II, and all the industry leaders of somewhere that was famously insular go "yeah, actually, this is good, this is what we should do, let's get this guy to meet everyone"?

>yeah, actually, this is good, this is what we should do, let's get this guy to meet everyone"

Or they go "they won, I guess we're obligated to try doing it their way at least once".

Japan’s destruction was extremely total; even if you did not get hit by the nukes, your city was most likely firebombed to the ground. The economy was in shambles, everyone who was still alive was struggling to eat as the logistics chain had totally broken down, etc.

In that context it is not really surprising that Japan rejected many of its old institutions and ways.

Japan already did that in the 19th century when they were shopping around for foreign experts in industry and the military for their modernization. Not a stretch to do it again considering people involved in that process were still alive.

A strange variant of this is Japan's reaction to getting anti-Semitic propaganda from Europe was that these people secretly controlling the world sounded pretty cool and competent, so they tried getting them to immigrate. Though, it didn't really work out.

He probably had an influence but I find it curious that he always gets brought up around these topics, as if he's the primary explanatory variable for Japanese manufacturing success.

I learned about him only recently and despite his supposedly strong influence, he isn't talked about much.

Fwiw, I hear about Deming so often that my bias is that he’s over represented! Then again, my dad was in the field so he was practically revered in my childhood.

Yep, same. My dad introduced "total quality management" into New Zealand and I heard about Deming a hell of a lot growing up.

I work at Toyota, and they credit him on day one of training on the Toyota philosophy. Toyota's success is just a function of them listening to western consultants after the war when western companies would not.

There are also some broader macroeconomic reasons that these philosophies took root in post-war Japan. The combination of a weakened currency and strong New Deal style labor laws (that were proposed but thwarted by Detroit) was unique. Labor was cheap but politically dominant and materials were in short supply (I believe Shoichiro took power in the wake of a nearly catastrophic strike that gave him very few options beyond innovating on process).

Or maybe it is the result of filling hollow, generic advice with some meaning. I'd really love to hear the original advice given by western consultants.

Deming had some genuinely counterintuitive stuff to say. The focus on reducing variance was obvious in retrospect, once you do the math, but important at the time.

Funny enough once cars from Japan started kicking the ass of the big three, they paid those people a lot to come to the US again and copy Japan.

The general storyline is that the US automakers mostly ignored Deming and he took his work to Japan. One always strongly suspects a degree of myth in such stories but certainly the Deming Japanese manufacturing story was standard fare for a lot of early-on DevOps presentations.

> I'm told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work

The “kanban” interfaces definitely originate from Toyota. Scrum was influenced by Toyota’s management techniques, among others. I believe other familiar concepts, e.g. “kaizen” or continuous improvement, also originate from Toyota.

Toyota wasn't first.

But it was them learning a lot from working on looms, and other stuff at textile mills taught them how to max productivity.

Textiles making was already a very competitive industry in late 19th century, and the only way to push forward in productivity after looms were optimized to the max was to cut slack in between machines — management techniques.

There the manufacturers were stealing each other's ideas "within months" as Japan had no enforceable Western style patent system yet.

The electric andon was for example copied from Suzuki looms, where it prevented looms from dethreading when the machine runs out of thread, and requiring hours to manually rethread it again.

Stopping the entire mill for a few minutes to recharge a loom begins to make much more sense when you understand that the alternative is to stop it for hours.

There are many books on the Toyota system, so that they have stolen the show. I have always suspected that other Japanese factories might have also had interesting production systems but only found one book about Honda. How did you know this detail about the electric andon originating at Suzuki? Can you suggest books on this topic?

>There the manufacturers were stealing each other's ideas "within months" as Japan had no enforceable Western style patent system yet. The electric andon was for example copied from Suzuki looms, where it prevented looms from dethreading when the machine runs out of thread, and requiring hours to manually rethread it again.

How horrible! I’m glad the patent system saved us from this backwardness!

Toyota learned it from western consultants, but made it work like a charm. I think they are the real champions of the lean philosophy, kanban, kaizen, 5s, etc.

I am curious how many people are rethinking how aggressively to set up a JIT system in the wake of COVID and the supply chain issues, given it clearly cost many companies an astronomical amount of money in the end. Obviously you shouldn't build your entire company around rare, worst case scenarios, but there should probably be some consideration budgeted in for them IMO and it seems few companies we ready for rainy days.

A very very tiny (maybe not even applicable) example is how I always keep a camera or two when I buy new ones and don't sell them all off. You never know when your workhorse is going to breakdown. Just something I'm mulling over I guess!

I remember a chap I know, who married a Russian, and he said the Iron-Curtain Soviet ethos was, to make two of everything, so that, when one inevitably borks, the other one can be used, or cannibalized for parts.

JIT made sense for Toyota and they took steps to ensure their suppliers were beholden to them (that is they shipped whenever Toyota needed it).

JIT doesn't make sense for global supply chains when the suppliers i.e. China or Russia government can impose embargoes at will with little warning.

> JIT made sense for Toyota and they took steps to ensure their suppliers were beholden to them (that is they shipped whenever Toyota needed it).

Did that still hold true during the pandemic? I mean if you can't get stuff on the ships (huge part of the chain) they can't go out. It's not always a choice for suppliers as we saw.

Sorry I don’t follow your question. The pandemic resulted in both closed factories and ships not leaving port. A double whammy for JIT.

Yeah that's what I mean - due to "the double whammy" they couldn't guarantee their deals with Toyota so it's all sort of moot, right?

Toyota had identified the strategic risk of chip supply some years earlier, and made sure they had access to large buffers of them, reducing the impact.

I’m not sure about the impact of shipping though.

See: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/toyota-how-it-avoided-se...

JIT also works really well when all your major manufacturing centers are an average 3-4 hour drive from each other. 6-8 at the furthest maybe.

JIT breaks down over global distances because “in time” and “instant” mean very different things even when moving nearly at the speed of sound. Even if no one embargoed anyone, you can’t beat the laws of physics.

Just in time doesn’t break down at all — it just calls for larger buffers

You can stream audio with a 5s delay and 10s jitter if you have a large enough buffer

JIT doesn’t mean instant. It means sizing to the first derivative (rate) and second derivative (jitter) of your f(x) (supply)

The rainy days were more like months for a lot of companies though. Imagine storing enough fuel in case you couldn’t get fuel for 5 months… it’s just unreasonable. It costs too much. At some point you just have to accept that you depend on a functioning world