Wamiq

The Toyota Way

Jeffrey K Liker

Tata McGraw-Hill, 2004

Introduction

It is obvious that there is something special about Toyota. The Japanese automobile

manufacturer currently has the fastest product development process in the world. New cars

and trucks take 12 months or less to design, while competitors typically require two to

three years. Toyota has phenomenal quality levels, that rivals can only dream of matching.

Toyota has turned operational excellence into a strategic weapon not merely through tools

and quality improvement methods but a deeper business philosophy rooted in

understanding of people and what motivates them. Its success is ultimately based on its

ability to develop leaders, build teams, and nurture a supportive culture, to devise strategy,

to build deep supplier relationships, and to maintain a learning organization.

Jeffrey Liker is an authority on Toyota. Liker gives an excellent account of how Toyota

has become one of the best managed companies in the world. He also outlines how other

companies can learn from Toyota and improve their way of doing business. This book

makes excellent reading for leaders building learning organizations.

The Toyota Production System

Toyota developed the Toyota Production System after World War II. While Ford and GM

used mass production, economies of scale, and big equipment to produce as many parts as

possible, as cheaply as possible, Toyota's market in post-war Japan was small. Toyota also

had to make a variety of vehicles on the same assembly line to satisfy its customers. By

making lead times short and focusing on keeping production lines flexible, Toyota realized

it could actually get higher quality, better customer responsiveness, better productivity, and

better utilization of equipment and space.

A basic premise of mass production is that machine downtime is obvious waste. A

machine shut down for repair is not making parts that could make money. But TPS has

challenged this...