Taichi Ohno is a production engineer whose formative years were spent in the textiles division of the Toyota Corporation, and who moved to the automotive business in 1943. Ohno is usually referred to as the Father of the Toyota...
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Taichi Ohno is a production engineer whose formative years were spent in the textiles division of the Toyota Corporation, and who moved to the automotive business in 1943. Ohno is usually referred to as the Father of the Toyota Production System (TPS), which is itself the basis for what is considered in the West as Lean manufacturing. In fact, the TPS was first launched in the West as Just in Time, or JIT, when the initial visits from the US and Europe to see how Japanese industry had stolen such a march resulted in people returning with stories of factories which made only what was required, when required. No wonder these people were capturing all our markets when they carried no stock and didn't need complex computer systems to plan production. All they had was little yellow cards which sat on the side of tins, stillages or baskets and instructed Machine Shops to provide components for their colleagues (or customers) in Assembly. Later, of course, we realised that there was more to it than this - these little yellow cards (or kanbans) only worked because of all the thought and effort that had been expended in creating a factory that challenged the basic concepts of manufacturing. We realised that JIT was about more than stock and batch quantities and when John Krafcik, a researcher in the late-1980s MIT study into automobile manufacturing, coined the term Lean Manufacturing, it seemed appropriate. Lean, in basic terms, means the elimination of waste (or Muda, in Toyota-speak). Ohno identified seven wastes to be addressed by the Toyota system, and they have become known as the 7Ws. So what are the 7Ws?
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