TABLE OF CONTENTS Lesson 2: If you are going uphill and taking one step at a time, you are headed in the right direction.
Many companies are plotting a course toward becoming a world-class enterprise. Not many, however, understand that a lean, world-class production system is neither new nor easy to implement. Companies like Toyota that are successful world-class manufacturing operations have accomplished their status one arduous step at a time. There is no such thing as becoming a world-class company overnight, and no such thing as becoming world-class at all without a continuous-improvement tool in every employee's tool belt. That's because world-class manufacturing is centrally concerned with production processes; culture change is not enough.
Toyota's history is discussed in Chapter 3, but the elimination of waste had its own early advocate in the United States.
Henry Ford hated to waste time. In 1926, he wrote, 'Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest [to make] of all wastes, and the hardest to correct, is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.' Between 1913 and 1914, Ford doubled production with no increase in the workforce. Between 1920 and 1926, cycle time or production lead time in his operations was reduced by 90 percent from 21 days to two days.3
The secret of Ford's success in creating a new process model for automobile manufacturing was continuous-flow assembly. The concept of...
