Sakichi Toyoda
Toyota’s development of ideas that later became lean may have started at the turn of the twentieth century with Sakichi Toyoda (Figure 8.12), in a textile factory with looms that stopped themselves when a thread broke. This became the seed of autonomation and Jidoka. Toyota’s journey with JIT may have started back in 1934 when it moved from textiles to produce its first car. Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation, directed the engine casting work and discovered many problems in their manufacturing. He decided he must stop the repairing of poor quality by intense study of each stage of the process. In 1936, when Toyota won its first truck contract with the Japanese government, his processes hit new problems and he developed the “Kaizen” improvement teams.
Levels of demand in the postwar economy of Japan were low and the focus of mass production on lowest cost per item via economies of scale therefore had little application. Having visited and seen supermarkets in the United States, Taiichi Ohno (1988) recognized the scheduling of work should not be driven by sales or production targets but by actual sales. Given the financial situation during this period, overproduction had to be avoided and thus the notion of pull (build to order rather than target driven push) came to underpin production scheduling.
It was with Taiichi Ohno at Toyota that these themes came together. He built on the already existing internal schools of thought and spread their breadth and use into what has now become the Toyota Production System (TPS). It is principally from the TPS (which was widely referred to in the 1980s as JIT manufacturing), but now including many other sources, that lean production is developing. Norman Bodek wrote the following in his foreword to a reprint of Ford’s Today and Tomorrow.
Toyoda was first introduced to the concepts of JIT and the TPS in 1980. Subsequently, Toyoda had the opportunity to witness its actual application at Toyota on one of our numerous Japanese study missions. There he met Mr. Taiichi Ohno, the system’s creator. When bombarded with questions from our group on what inspired his thinking, he just laughed and said he learned it all from Henry Ford’s book. The scale, rigor, and continuous learning aspects of TPS have made it a core concept of lean.
Tata Group
Jamsetji Tata, in full Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (born 3 March 1839, Navsari, Gujarat, India – died 19 May 1904, Bad Nauheim, Germany), Indian philanthropist and entrepreneur founded the Tata Group (Figure 8.13). His ambitious endeavors helped catapult India into the league of industrialized countries.
Born into a Parsi family, Jamsetji was the first child and only son of Nusserwanji Tata. After graduating from Elphinstone College, Bombay (now Mumbai), in 1858, he joined his father’s export‐trading firm and helped establish its branches in Japan, China, Europe, and the United States. In 1868 Jamsetji founded a trading company that later evolved into the Tata Group. In 1872 he focused on cotton manufacturing and subsequently founded mills at Nagpur, Bombay, and Coorla. His enterprises were noted for efficiency, for improved labor‐protection policies, and for the introduction of finer grades of fiber. He also planned for the Bombay‐area hydroelectric power plants that became the Tata Power Company in 1906.
In 1901 Jamsetji began organizing India’s first large‐scale ironworks, and six years later these were incorporated as the Tata Iron and Steel Company (now Tata Steel). Under the direction of his sons, Sir Dorabji Jamsetji Tata (1859–1932) and Sir Ratanji Tata (born in 1937 – retired in 2012), the Tata Iron and Steel Company became the largest privately owned steelmaker in India and the nucleus of a group of companies producing not only textiles, steel, and hydroelectric power but also chemicals, agricultural equipment, trucks, locomotives, and cement. Jamsetji’s other commercial ventures included the Taj Mahal Palace, the first luxury hotel in India. After Jamsetji’s death in 1904, his family retained control of the Tata Group and built it into a global conglomerate that by the early twenty‐first century included more than 100 companies.
A noted philanthropist, Jamsetji established the J.N. Tata Endowment in 1892, which encouraged Indian students to pursue higher education. In 1898 he donated land for a research institute in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), and his sons ultimately established (1911) the Indian Institute of Science there. The Tata family went on to become perhaps the most important private funder of technical education and scientific research in India.
Leave a Reply