Toyota Recall : Are Lean Methodologies at Blame?

Toyota recall: Are the Lean Operations at blame?

What is Lean?

Lean manufacturing or simply “Lean” is a production practice which maximizes customer value and eliminates or minimizes waste. The central idea is to create more value for customers with fewer resources. Here “value” is any activity or production process for which the customer is willing to pay for.

For many, Lean is the set of "tools" that helps in the identification and steady elimination of waste (muda). As waste is eliminated quality improves while production time and cost are reduced. Examples of such "tools" are Value Stream Mapping, Five S, Kanban (pull systems), and poka-yoke (error-proofing).

Origin of Lean Thinking

The term was coined by John Krafcik, a quality engineer for TOYOTA-GM NUMMI joint venture in California in 1988 in an article “Triumph of Lean Production system”.

Earlier in pre-20th century Benjamin Franklin’s “The way to Wealth” talks about the evils of carrying unnecessary inventory. This article has been a major influence behind Ford’s Just-in-Time manufacturing practices.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, introduced the concepts of Standard Operating Procedure and best practice deployment in 1911. He also warned about the evils of the piece rate production system and criticized it for lacking the concern for quality output.

Toyota Production System

Sakichi Toyoda started the development of the ideas which later came to be known as Lean in a textile factory with looms, which stopped automatically whenever a thread broke. This technological breakthrough was the laying stone behind automation and was known as the Jidoka. Toyota incorporated the JIT concept around 1936 when they moved from the textile business to the automobiles. There were a lot of issues in the production line of trucks, which led to Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation to incorporate Kaizen (means: continuous improvement) teams in the factory.

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