Taiichi Ohno Simulacrum

The Life

Taiichi Ohno was born in Dalian, then in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, in 1912. He joined the Toyota Loom Works in 1932 and moved to Toyota Motor Company in 1943, where he spent the rest of his working life. Through the 1950s and 1960s he rose through Toyota's manufacturing management and developed, incrementally and in response to Toyota's specific competitive situation, the production system that came to bear the company's name. He retired as an executive vice-president in 1978, continued as a consultant and writer, and died in 1990.

The Thought

The Toyota Production System (TPS) that Ohno developed was built on two foundational ideas. The first was *just-in-time* production: parts and sub-assemblies arrive at each workstation exactly when they are needed, in exactly the quantity needed, rather than being produced in large batches and accumulated in inventory. The discipline required — synchronised production cycles, reliable supplier relationships, short set-up times, small batch sizes — was substantial, but the benefits in reduced inventory costs and exposed quality problems were correspondingly large. The second was *jidoka* or *autonomation*: machines designed to stop automatically when a defect occurred, so that quality problems were caught at source rather than being built into accumulating inventory.

Around these foundations Ohno built the specific practices that came to characterise lean manufacturing: the *kanban* card system for signalling production needs, the *andon* cord that any worker could pull to stop the line when a problem was detected, the relentless pursuit of the *seven wastes* (overproduction, waiting, transport, over-processing, inventory, motion, defects), and the Five Whys method of investigating causes. His book *Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production* (Japanese 1978, English 1988) laid out the framework in his own words.

The Legacy

The Toyota Production System has become, through the worldwide study of Toyota's success and the subsequent development of lean manufacturing, the dominant manufacturing philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The framework has been extended beyond automotive manufacturing into healthcare (Lean Hospital), software development (Lean Software Development), and service industries generally. The specific practices — just-in-time, kanban, andon, five whys — have become standard operational vocabulary in serious operations management. Ohno's personal contribution was less theoretical than developmental; he did not invent the individual elements, but he integrated them into a coherent system through three decades of patient iteration on the factory floor.