Lean Manufacturing Principles Guide, Version 0.5. A Guide to Lean Shipbuilding

The Toyota Production System TPS was developed to become competitive on world markets, particularly competing with Henry Ford, while addressing the particular circumstances Toyota faced in Japan. Through years of trial and error on the shopfloor Toyota discovered that they could simultaneously achieve high quality, low cost, and just-in time delivery by shortening the production flow by eliminating waste. This simple concept is at the heart of the TPS and what distinguishes it from the older mass production paradigm it supplants. The focus is always on shortening the production flow and waste is anything that gets in the way of a smooth flow. The theoretical ideal is continuous one-by-one piece flow. While this ideal is rarely realized, practitioners of TPS understand directionally that performance of the system will improve if the system is moving toward continuous flow by eliminating waste. To understand what this new paradigm of manufacturing of lean manufacturing is, it helps to briefly consider the history of mass production in America and how Toyotas path deviated from that trajectory.