The Toyota Way

I've just finished a very interesting book lately - The Toyota Way - on lean manufacturing developed at Toyota Motor company and written by Jeffrey K. Liker. It is the first that I read on this kind of subject, management and industrial engineering. And I'm glad I did.

The Toyota way is all about how well you keep a healthy and growing business through 14 principles, which brings your organization in the lean production sphere. The principles are organized on the idea expressed in Maslow hierarchy of needs. So basic principles have to be accomplished and lived before climbing to the next level.

The principles are:

Base level:
1. Develop a long term vision. Seems obvious but in fact only few companies really follows a long term strategy when short-term profits are reacheable. And many times, layoffs are solely due to satisfy shareholders and show great columns in the annual report final pages.

Second level:
2. Create a continuous process flow. Stop moving around pieces and make it straight.
3. Stopping culture. Quality right first. Do not hesitate to stop production when problems show out. Stopping the line will force other coworkers to help you out and find the best solution. Defects are solved faster and quality will increase.
4. Use a "pull" system (kanban). Do not pill up stuff. Inventory are troublesome by hiding defects, using valuable space and put stress on both workers and equipment. Only prepare enough supplies to maintain the line working.
5. Level-out the workload. Change over are difficult (see QCO or SMED) but are essential to level the workload. Having your workload levelled, by maybe batching few orders and reorganize the production, your supply chain and production can respond more easily to always changing demands.
6. Visual Controls. Probably the best and practical way to show how well the process is, use visual controls (lights, placeholder marks for tools). Keep them simple, do not use technology when not necessary. Everyone should be able to tell if everything is ok on the shop floor by just having a quick look.
7. Standardization of tasks. Only through standardization improvement can survive. Disparate techniques are useless since they are not share among workers for a given task. Thus, the procedure cannot evolved since nobody shares the same view of the work.
8. Use thoroughly tested technology that truly helps people and organization. Technology is good when it helps people. Final. IT should help and not control the process.

Third level:
9. Respect and help your partners and suppliers. If you help your partners, you will help yourself.
10. Grow your leaders inside the organization. Outsiders do not live the organizational culture. There is a good chance that principle 1 will be transgressed.
11. Develop your employees and team. Everyone input is required to help the organization. Select people that understands the principles and like to learn.

Ultimate level:
12. Make decision slowly by concensus; implement rapidly. Definitely my favourite. Make everyone think on the problem, share ideas of everybody that participates to the process whatever its role, considers all alternatives thoroughly, make a summary on a one pager (A3 format) and circulate the information across the organization to seek for original input. You never know, maybe someone already went through your problem before. Once a decision is make, then everyone would share the same vision since all did participate. The direction is clear to all and the implementation is done swifly.
13. Go and see by yourself (Genchi Genbutsu). Get your hand dirty. Like for math, the only good way to learn integrals is by practicing, over and over. Improving a process requires you to see it, every day. Not by reading charts or diagrams but by realworld experience. On the field work.
14. Be a learning organization, continuous improvement (kaisen). Never sit back. Always seek for enhancements. Stay alert and think.

The last three principles are the most interesting for a service company like software or consulting firm. However, the other principles can help to gain a broad vision of organization processes and seek for improvements that really add value to the end-user lifes.