Providing machines andoperators the ability to detect when an abnormalcondition has occurred andimmediately stop work. This enables operations tobuild-in quality at eachprocess and to separate men and machines for moreefficient work. Jidoka is oneof the two pillars of the Toyota ProductionSystem along with just-in-time. Jidokais sometimes called autonomation,meaning automation with human intelligence.Asystem of production that makes and delivers just what is needed, just whenitis needed, and just in the amount needed. JIT and jidoka are the two pillarsofthe Toyota Production System. Continuous improvement of an entire value streamor an individual process tocreate more value with less waste. There are twolevels of kaizen: (1) Systemor flow kaizen focuses on the overall value streamand (2) process kaizenfocuses on individual processes. A signaling device thatgives authorization and instructions for the productionor withdrawal(conveyance) of items in a pull system. The term is Japanese forsign orsignboard.A business system for organizing and managing product development,operations,suppliers, and customer relations that requires less human effort,less space,less capital, and less time to make products with fewer defects toprecisecustomer desires, compared with the previous system of massproduction.Lean production waspioneered by Toyota after World War II and, as of1990, typically required halfthe human effort, half the manufacturing space andcapital investment for agiven amount of capacity, and a fraction of thedevelopment and lead time ofmass production systems, while making products inwider variety at lowervolumes with many fewer defects. The term was coined byJohn Krafcik, aresearch assistant at MIT with the International Motor VehicleProgram in thelate 1980s.A 5-step thought process proposed by James Womack andDan Jones in their 1996book Lean Thinking to guide managers through aleantransformation. The steps are:Specify value from the standpoint of the endcustomer.Identify all the steps in the value stream.Make the value creatingsteps flow toward the customer.Let customers pull value from the next upstreamactivity.Pursue perfection.ObeyaObeya in Japanese means simply “big room.” AtToyota it has become a majorproject management tool, used especially in product development, toenhanceeffective and timely communication. Similar in concept to traditional“warrooms,” an Obeya will contain highly visual charts and graphs depictingprogramtiming, milestones and progress to date and countermeasures to existingtimingor technical problems. Project leaders will have desks in the Obeyaaswill others at appropriate points in the program timing. The purpose istoensure project success and shorten the plan-do-check-act cycle. Any process alonga value stream that sets the pace for the entire stream. (Thepacemaker processshould not be confused with a bottleneck process whichnecessarily constrainsdownstream processes due to a lack of capacity.) Thepacemaker process isusually near the customer end of the value stream, oftenthe final assemblycell. .Production LeadTime (also ThroughputTime and Total Product Cycle Time)The time required for a product to move all the way through a process fromstartto finish. At the plant level this is often termed door-to-door time.
Theconceptcan also be applied to the time required for a design to progress fromstart tofinish in product development or for a product to proceed from rawmaterials allthe way to the customer.The available production time divided by customerdemand. For example, if awidget factory operates 480 minutes per day andcustomers demand 240 widgetsper day, takt time is two minutes. Similarly, ifcustomers want two newproducts per month, takt time is two weeks. The purposeof takt time is toprecisely match production with demand. It provides theheartbeat of a leanproduction system. Takt time was first used asa production management tool in theGerman aircraft industry in the 1930s. (Taktis German for a precise interval oftime such as a musical meter.) It was theinterval at which aircraft were movedahead to the next production station. Theconcept was widely utilized withinToyota in the 1950s and was in widespreaduse throughout the Toyota supply baseby the late 1960s. Toyota typically reviewsthe takt time for a process everymonth, with a tweaking review every ten days.The production system developed byToyota Motor Corporation to provide bestquality, lowest cost, and shortest leadtime through the elimination of waste. TPSis comprised of two pillars,just-in-time production and jidoka. TPS ismaintained and improved throughiterations of standardized work and kaizen,following the scientific method ofthe plan-do-check-act cycle. Development of TPS iscredited to Taiichi Ohno,Toyota’s chief of production in the post-WWII period.Widespread recognition ofTPS as the model production system grew rapidly withthe publication in 1990 ofThe Machine That Changed the World, the result of 5 years of researchled by theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT researchers foundthat TPS was somuch more effective and efficient than traditional, massproduction that itrepresented a completely new paradigm.All of the actions, both value-creatingand nonvalue-creating, required tobring a product from concept to launch andfrom order to delivery. Theseinclude actions to process information from thecustomer and actions totransform the product on its way to the customer.Asimple diagram of every step involved in the material and informationflowsneeded to bring a product from order to delivery. A current-state mapfollows aproduct’s path from order to delivery to determine the currentconditions. Afuture-state map shows the opportunities for improvementidentified in thecurrent-state map to achieve a higher level of performance atsome futurepoint.Any activity that consumes resources but creates no value forthe customer..