Executive Overview The Toyota Production System (TPS) has been lauded as the pinnacle of flexible, just-in-time manufacturing and design and the founder of “lean work” systems, which claim to improve product quality and employee productivity. American automobile manufacturers readily adopted the “Toyota Way” and many of the management practices in service industries, such as Total Quality Manag...

Lean manufacturing is a production philosophy made popular by Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC). It is globally known as the Toyota Production System (TPS) and has the ultimate aim of reducing cost by thoroughly eliminating wastes or muda. TPS embraces the Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing; achieving cost reduction through lead time reduction. JIT manufacturing can be achieved by implementing Pull ...

The Toyota Production System (TPS) has been widely studied and copied by variouscompanies to improve several of their processes. However, many of them have not beensuccessful due to the fact that only the tools and tactics have been focused and the coreunderlying principles have been overlooked. There are examples of a few companies whichhave achieved cost savings and operationa...

The Toyota Production System (TPS) has been widely studied and copied by various companies to improve several of their processes. However, many of them have not been successful due to the fact that only the tools and tactics have been focused and the core underlying principles have been overlooked. There are examples of a few companies which have achieved cost savings and operational efficienci...

The term “lean manufacturing”, (Womack et al., 1990), refers to the generalization of the Toyota Production system (TPS), also called Just-in-Time (JIT). One feature of such system is the reduction of costs through elimination of waste (Sugimori et al., 1977). Waste or muda (in Japanese) is anything that does not add value to a product. Elimination of muda is done by means of continuous improve...

How Toyota's product design and development process helps find the best solutions and develop successful products. Toyota Motor Corporation is an industry leader in product development lead time while using fewer engineers than its U.S. competitors. It has also shown remarkable consistency in market share growth and profit per vehicle, which led to cash reserves of $21 billion, exceeding those ...

The Toyota Production System (TPS) is recognized by many to be the paragon for manufacturing system design. As such, it has been imitated by several companies inside their production plants in an effort to reap the manufacturing performance of Toyota. While imitation typically consists of "retrofitting" existing traditional plants with TPS, this thesis focuses on the actions required to design ...

In order to face their global competitors, one solution consists for manufacturing companies around the world to implement the Toyota Production System (TPS). Lean manufacturing evolved from TPS. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that lean principles and concepts can be successfully applied in a company from the retail industry, such as Seven-Eleven Japan. Lean retailing is now a reali...

Many companies have tried to copy Toyota's famous production system--but without success. Why? Part of the reason, says the author, is that imitators fail to recognize the underlying principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS), focusing instead on specific tools and practices. This article tells the other part of the story. Building on a previous HBR article, "Decoding the DNA of the Toyot...

The Toyota production system (TPS) or lean has long been regarded as a powerful approach for managing manufacturing factories. However, in the early 1990s, the TPS was found not to work when it was applied to Japanese electronics companies. TPS is fit for a stable, but not volatile, business environment such as that which the electronics industry belongs. This volatile environment can be descri...