I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the different influences of lean. I thought I’d share my findings.
Late 1800’s: Fredrick Winslow Taylor was the father of Scientific Management and largely responsible for the Science of Industrial Engineering. Taylor sought to improve efficiency through time studies and scientific analysis of labor processes. His book “The Principles of Scientific Management” is available for free on kindle. The book outlines three basic points.
- There is a huge loss of efficiency in industry.
- The remedy lies in the systematic approach to management and not in finding the perfect employee.
- That management is a true science that relies upon laws and principles and can be applied to any activity.
Taylor’s vision was a very “top down” approach to improving productivity. He felt that careful study and oversight by management could greatly improve productivity. Taylor, however, didn’t really take into account the ideas of the worker.
Early 1900’s
When Henry Ford started the Ford Motor Company in 1903, automobiles were expensive and could only be purchased by the rich. Ford had a vision of a vehicle for the masses. Something that the everyday man could go out into the country side and enjoy his leisure time.
In order to achieve this vision, Ford sought to lower the cost of a vehicle through improving the process of manufacturing a car. He started with interchangeable parts. This was an invention that Eli Whitney had pioneered many years before. He needed to ensure that any part would fit into any vehicle. By starting to produce these parts, he began the specialization of labor in his plant by having individual people working on small components of the car rather than having a few people build the whole car.
His second innovation was adopting the assembly line process into his plant. Rather than trying to move all the materials for a car to an individual cell where it could be assembled, Ford envisioned a line where the care moved past the parts and people installed pieces of the car until it was finished. Where certain parts had more work than others, he established subassemblies. His highland park factory was a model of flow where parts were produced and assembled on multiple floors and passed down through the building until a fully assembled car would drive down the ramp at the end.
Ford’s system sought to reduce variation. He tried to limit variation in the parts and even in the color of the cars. He sought a system that made one thing very efficiently.
Ford was an innovator and looked at all things around him as needing to be improved. He would have the boxes that materials were delivered in created in such a way that the wood could be used for the floor boards of the car. He even went further and looked at how he could utilize the sawdust when they had to cut the wood. He found that by compressing the wood scape he could make charcoal out of it. His partner Kingsford later changed the Ford Charcoal company they founded to the Kingsford company and they still sell charcoal briquettes under that name.
He also established the Ford Hospital in Detroit. He built the hospital using concepts from his plant including limiting the amount of walking a nurse would have to do (a non value-adding activity) and also established private rooms and standard fee structures. Large wards were common at the time and you might walk in with a broken arm and walk out with tuberculosis. Rates were $4.50 per day which was a price his employees could afford.
1920’s and 1930’s
In 1924 Sakichi Toyoda invented the Automated Loom. He was an inventor and was interested in helping his Mother with the hard work she had to do day in and day out. The loom he invented was a fully automated machine delivering vastly improved quality and a 20 fold increase in productivity. It was designed to stop if a problem occurred. The idea of stopping automatically and calling attention to the issue is central to the Toyota Production System.
In 1933, Kiichiro Toyoda (Sakichi’s son) established an Automobile Department at Toyoda Loom Works. In 1937 it was spun off as the Toyoda Motor Company. Kiichiro traveled to the United States and studied Ford’s production system and was determined to adopt it into his smaller volume operation.
Kiichiro’s solution was to design a system where parts were only created as they were needed. He was credited with coining the term “just in time”.
World War 2
When the war came, all the able bodied men in the American factories were sent over seas to fight. This left the American manufacturing system decimated. They recruited people too young or too old to fight along with women to man the production lines. The American government established a training system called TWI that could be used to help factories teach and train the new employees and help gear up our manufacturing. TWI had three main sections:
JI: Job Instruction. This was put in place to help train the new recruits faster. Jobs were broken down into their steps and each step was listed with it’s key points and reasons for the key points. It emphasized the saying “if the worker hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught”. This was a starting point for standard work.
JM: Job Modification. In order to increase productivity, the workers were asked to review their job and look at each of the steps and see if they could find ways to improve the process. This was a starting point for continuous improvement.
JR: Job Relations. Leaders were taught to “treat each employee as an individual”. This was a starting point for respect for people.
As the war ended, industry all across the globe was decimated. Some Americans saw how well the TWI system worked and decided to form consulting companies to go out and teach these methods to the rest of the world. This included Japan where the TWI system was well received.
40’s and 50’s.
Doctor Edwards Deming was a statistician who was enlisted to help with the Census in Japan after the war. Deming promoted the Shewhart Cycle (Plan Do Study Adjust) which was later changed to PDCA and sometimes called the Deming cycle. Deming taught statistical analysis and quality concepts to the Japanese and is regarded as having more impact on Japanese manufacturing than any other person not of Japanese heritage.
At Toyota, in the late 40’s, Taiichi Ohno was rising through the ranks. He had studied the production system that Ford had built and in the 50’s he visited America and was fascinated by the American grocery store. It was a good example of a “pull” system. You don’t put something back on the shelf until the customer removes one. Ohno developed the 7 forms of waste or Muda (Overproduction, Transportation, Inventory, Defects, Excess movement, and Over processing) and is largely credited as putting all the pieces together into the Toyota Production System.
