The Toyota Way: Fourteen Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer Book

Notes for internal use:

- Have a manual process first, that allows you to understand better where automation is needed
- Treat colleagues as customers (provide output for them at the same specs as for the end customer)
- Kaisen - improve processes by a tiny bit, until all waste is removed
- Kaisen also encourages the delegation of process improvement (or proposal-generation) down from management to regular workers
- Kaisen also states that to improve something, you have to standardize it first (for reliable replicability?)
- Focus on quality rather than cost, this eventually leads to cost reduction too
- Muda - waste
1. Overproduction
2. Waiting
3. Unnecessary transport of goods or parts
4. Overprocessing or incorrect processing
5. Excess inventory. This also masks problems, like suboptimal supply chains, because the excess buffer dampens it
6. Unnecessary movement of employees
7. Defects - repairs, reworks, refactoring post release
8. Unused employment creativity
- Muri - overburden (people or equipment)
- This leads to safety issues and defects
- Mura - unevenness
- Unbalanced load, at times you are in zombie mode, other times you have not much to do
- Lack of balance means that you will have to keep supplies reserved to handle the worst case, whereas most of the time they will be unused (hence muda)
- Better to be slow and steady like a turtle, than fast and jerky like a rabbit
- Jidoka - stop the production line to fix issues and improve the process
- Think about what gets halted - no need to stop everything
-Every employee can pull the cord to do so, thus everyone is empowered and at the same time - responsible
- Cost of fix in development is much smaller than in production
- Autonomation - automation augmented with human intelligence
- Lexus rx330 has a 170 item checklist
- Institute a process improvement proposal mechanism, that employees can use to submit their ideas about improvements
- Visualize state, so no problems are hidden. Use dashboards to reflect the processes, so bottlenecks and weak spots are easy to see.
- Genshi genbutsu - go and see for yourself
- Nemawashi - Make decisions slowly, by consensus; implement rapidly
- Ask "why" 5 times
- Hansei - reflection. Think about the situation. When a mistake is made - it is important to see how the employee reflects upon it and how they present the lessons they've drawn from it
- Change the approach from "firefighting" to "process improvement"