The Thinking Production System（英语阅读）.pdf

THE THINKING PRODUCTION SYSTEM Michael Ballé, Godefroy Beauvallet, Art Smalley, Durward Sobek Toyota Motor Corporation no longer needs an introduction. The spectacular success of Toyota in the last few years, combined with the no less spectacular problems of western automakers, has propelled Toyota from an isolated curiosity within one industry to a model of world-class design, development and manufacturing. Much of its success is attributed to its now fabled Toyota Production System (TPS), dubbed lean manufacturing (or simply, “lean”) in Womack, Jones and Roos’ ground-breaking 1 book, The Machine that Changed the World . Since that time, TPS has been extensively studied with dozens of books and articles describing the system and its tools and techniques, and promising significant gains in efficiency, quality and on-time 2 delivery. Numerous authors have described successful lean transformations . Toyota itself has contributed significantly to the diffusion of its model, because they need their local suppliers to perform at the same high level if they want to reproduce their success outside of Japan. Indeed, lean is now being applied across broad sectors of 3 4 5 the economy, from logistics to healthcare to building construction to services . And yet, though many corporate players have endeavored to “go lean,” few have succeeded beyond reaping the low-hanging fruits. Hajime Ohba, head of the Toyota Supplier Support Center, recently commented, “Many firms have doubled productivity in the short run, but few have been able to evolve by continuing to apply the pr