Toyota Production System (TPS) is based on the principle of “complete elimination of all waste” in a pursuit of the most efficient methods. Toyota Motor Corporation's vehicle production system is a way of "making things" that is sometimes referred to as a "lean manufacturing system" or a "Just-in-Time (JIT) system," and has come to be well known and studied worldwide. This blog aims to discuss the TPS briefly and what factors go into making the system so revered.
TPS has been evolved naturally over the period of five
decades of Toyota’s manufacturing experience. It is based on many years of
continuous improvements, with the objective of "making the vehicles
ordered by customers in the quickest and most efficient way, in order to
deliver the vehicles as quickly as possible."
The Toyota Production System (TPS) was established based on
two concepts: The first is called "jidoka" (which can be loosely
translated as "automation with a human touch") which means that when
a problem occurs, the equipment stops immediately, preventing defective
products from being produced; The second is the concept of
"Just-in-Time," in which each process produces only what is needed by
the next process in a continuous flow.
The concepts of just-in-time (JIT) and jidoka both have
their roots in the prewar period. Sakichi Toyoda, founder of the Toyota group
of companies, invented the concept of jidoka in the early 20th Century by
incorporating a device on his automatic looms that would stop the loom from
operating whenever a thread broke. This enabled great improvements in quality
and freed people to do more value creating work than simply monitoring machines
for quality. Eventually, this simple concept found its way into every machine,
every production line, and every Toyota operation.
Based on the basic philosophies of jidoka and Just-in-Time,
the TPS can efficiently and quickly produce vehicles of sound quality, one at a
time, that fully satisfy customer requirements.
Jidoka means that
a machine safely stops when the normal processing is completed. It also means
that, should a quality / equipment problem arise, the machine detects the
problem on its own and stops, preventing defective products from being
produced. As a result, only products satisfying quality standards will be
passed on to the following processes on the production line.
Since a machine automatically stops when processing is
completed or when a problem arises and is communicated via the
"andon" (problem display board), operators can confidently continue
performing work at another machine, as well as easily identify the problem's
cause to prevent its recurrence. This means that each operator can be in charge
of many machines, resulting in higher productivity, while continuous
improvements lead to greater processing capacity.
Just-in-Time: In
order to deliver a vehicle ordered by a customer as quickly as possible, the
vehicle is efficiently built within the shortest possible period of time by
adhering to the following:
- When a vehicle order is received, a production instruction must be issued to the beginning of the vehicle production line as soon as possible.
- The assembly line must be stocked with required number of all needed parts so that any type of ordered vehicle can be assembled.
- The assembly line must replace the parts used by retrieving the same number of parts from the parts-producing process (the preceding process).
- The preceding process must be stocked with small numbers of all types of parts and produce only the numbers of parts that were retrieved by an operator from the next process.
How do you think are the processes of the TPS and the processes
followed by the Dabbawalla’s of Mumbai similar and different?
References:
http://www.lean.org/Common/LexiconTerm.aspx?termid=353
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