Author Archive
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Friday, September 3, 2010 |
If we think of the material and information flow diagram then IT is dealing
with the information flow. When we physically transform a process by moving
things around we are acting on the material flow. When we transform the
information presented to help make decisions we are dealing with IT whether it
is in the form of an empty space on the floor, a card, or something from a
computer. The concept of value stream mapping is to design the material and
information flow intentionally based on defined principles to achieve a clear business purpose. One principle isthat one piece flow is the ideal. Another is ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Saturday, August 21, 2010 |
"Jidoka" is not a single thing you implement. It is one of the two main pillars of TPS. Just-in-time is a complex set of tools, principles, and disciplines and Jidoka is certainly nothing less. The original concept came from Sakichi Toyoda's loom that stopped itself when there was a quality problem, which also separated the operator from the machine, allowing operators to run multiple machines and do more value added work. In modern Toyota plants it is often translated into the andon system of line stopping and quick response to problems one by one. I think of it is building ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Sunday, July 18, 2010 |
In my new book in progress we talk of three levels of lean (inspired by David Meier). The outer level of the sphere is proliferation of tools by the experts which by itself is a "lean facade." This level is not sustainable. If the experts teach managers the tools and they embrace and apply them they can get to the next level of "management as lean implementers." This level is sustainable, but typically managers tend to be sporadic in making improvements "when they have time." The best companies then advance to "continuous improvement by the work group." The final step ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010 |
Let's consider a company that we are working with that has already decided it needs lean to improve quality, productivity, and timeliness of delivery to the customer. It happens to be a major retailer and they brought in an outside CEO to “professionalize” the business. The outside CEO is a financial guy who grew another similar business by several times. He claimed to use lean, but it quickly became apparent that it was what we might call "fake lean" focused only on the tools. What we mean by that is that he had a bunch of black belts certified ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Saturday, June 19, 2010 |
I always feel a little uncomfortable when a question begins with: "How do you build a culture that does ____?" As far as I know there is no lego set for building culture. In the last chapter of our book Toyota Culture we quote Edgar Schein as saying: "Never start with the idea of changing your culture. Always start with the issue the organization faces."
Why would a leading cultural guru suggest we avoid changing culture? I do not think he is saying culture does not matter or even that culture cannot change. He is saying that culture is extremely difficult ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2010 |
One thing we know about lean is that you learn it by doing it, not by sitting in the office. With all of the different types of organizations I have worked with I must admit that it has been rare to go with the CEO to the gemba. They have not participated in kaizen activities, our meetings are in offices and board rooms, and in other cases I personally never met the CEO. For the most part our contacts have only gone as high as the vice president level (engineering, continuous improvement, quality, operations). That is a problem. We have ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 |
I agree that many people get confused on the relationship between lean and innovation. Steve Spear explained very well that underlying this is a confusion about what innovation is. In reality the greatest innovators are disciplined thinkers who try incremental experiments one by one learning from each. Thomas Edison was famous for his discipline and for learning from all his failed light bulbs before finally finding something that worked. The something that worked represented accumulated learning from years of smaller experiments that proved incremental principles and that showed what does not work. Unfortunately when we see the results of a ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Thursday, April 22, 2010 |
One way to think about it is like a tight rope walker. You would not want an amateur trying it without a net. It takes a great deal of talent to earn you way to increasing the height and eventually eliminating the net. The equation for calculating inventory in lean is pretty conventional--enough inventory to handle the replenishment time plus safety stock. The amount of safety stock needed depends on how stable the consuming operation is and how stable the supplying operation is. In other words, more variability means more need for inventory. The goal of TPS is not zero ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Sunday, April 11, 2010 |
The most stunning accomplishment of Toyota over the last fifty years is their turnaround from making “junk” to virtually redefining quality in the auto industry. They were influenced to the core by W. Edwards Deming and quality is evident everywhere in the company. The objective of the Toyota Production System is presented as Quality, cost, delivery, safety and morale and any metric board in Toyota will include quality indicators.
Every “lean consultant” or lean training course I know emphasizes quality. In this sense I disagree with the questioner who claims lean focuses only on cost and efficiency. On the other hand ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010 |
The relationship between lean and six sigma is one of my favorite topics....Not! It is fitting that this question came at Easter time which is famous for the Easter egg hunt. Let's assume that lean eggs are red ones and six sigma eggs are blue ones. If you gather only the red eggs you will have an imbalance. It will allow you to gather the eggs very quickly and efficiently but the red eggs are all different sizes and therefore there is a lot of variation. On the other hand the blue eggs are very uniform so gathering some of ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Monday, March 15, 2010 |
It is interesting to get a question as direct as this, especially coming from a management icon like Edgar Schein. Notice that the question implies Toyota is not concerned about safety regardless of how one answers.
In the current recall crisis certainly the stories formulated by the press paint a picture of an arrogant company that is secretive about safety test results and has put profits before safety. That message has been reinforced by many outside observers citing secret memos and mountains of data about sudden acceleration incidents over a decade that were ignored until the U.S. Department of Transportation had ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010 |
1. Clearly define the work as much as possible
In the Toyota Way I discuss the concept of standardization to enhance innovation. A core idea in kaizen is that you cannot improve a process that is not stable. If an individual makes changes on their own nobody else benefits and if that individual moves on the improvement is lost. Group learning (as opposed to individual learning) depends on standardization. I also refer to Paul Adler's distinction between enabling bureaucracy (assists those doing the work and engages them) versus coercive bureaucracy (like Taylorism poses outside constraints to control the person). In Toyota ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Tuesday, March 9, 2010 |
Interestingly I just spoke to a Canadian manufacturing company today that supplies Toyota and has several years of experience implementing TPS. He said his biggest disappointment was the the culture still does not support surfacing problems. People are afraid they will be blamed and they hide problems. So this seems to be a generic problem across manufacturing and service. When I interviewed the first head of human resources for the Georgetown, Kentucky plant (Japanese) he said what was most startling to him when he first came to America was that Americans did not like to say they had a problem. ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 |
You have some overweight friends and even children who eat junk food and do not exercise. You discover a new fitness program that is the perfect blend of exercise and diet. You enjoy what you are eating and you feel better than ever in your life. You wish to share the wealth and convince your children and friends to follow that fitness program. You manage to convince them to come to a “blitz” event at the fitness center where they introduce the training regime and you have a healthy meal. They will then prescribe a diet and schedule biweekly exercise. ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Saturday, January 30, 2010 |
According to some reports there have been issues of unintended acceleration over a decade and Toyota should have responded much earlier. According to my Toyota sources they have reports of unintended acceleration all the time and need to focus on systematic causes that they can actually verify and fix. When customers complain about unintended acceleration the dealers check a code on what they work on (e.g., fixed pedal) and then if there is some pattern (e.g., a larger than expected number) Toyota will investigate. When they investigated earlier incidents they were not finding specific engineering design problems but complex interactions ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Sunday, January 17, 2010 |
As one might expect from one of our most admired intellectual leaders of the learning organization movement, Peter Senge asks a penetrating, and in some ways painful question. All of us who are writing for this lean blog are also lean advisors to organizations in some capacity. We huff and we puff and we try to reorient the behavior and thinking of the organization to what we think of as the lean ideal. In fact the one core principle that has brought us all together is that lean is about leadership and daily behavior, not a set of tools and ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Thursday, January 7, 2010 |
The answer is a qualified yes. In fact Toyota has an annual goal setting process called hoshin kanri and the office of the CFO is very involved in setting the financial targets for the corporation. They are then cascaded down throughout the world at all levels and there are regular reviews of progress through the year. They almost always hit the targets. My qualification is that Toyota has worked really, really hard to develop the capability to deliver on those targets. The key is the capability of the people and the process to deliver. Toyota has invested heavily in that ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 |
I just happened to be working on yet another book in the Toyota Way series when I got this question. The book, called The Toyota Way to Excellence, is about the journey to lean by organizations outside Toyota. Believe it or not I was in the midst of writing a section called "managing change is political." Politics is the use or abuse of power. Whether it is viewed as use or abuse depends on the perspective and interests of who is doing the viewing. To lean change agents who are trying to help the organization ...
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By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System
- Last updated: Sunday, December 6, 2009 |
In some ways the word "lean" was an unfortunate choice and in other ways a brilliant choice. The intention was that a lean person is healthy in a holistic way--muscles in the right place, all organs functioning properly, able to hold up to intense exercise and even hostile environmental conditions. It is a great metaphor for what the flexible, adaptable, solid to the core company should be like. Company executives that treat lean as mean and use the tools to shed people, the source of the company's health, are either delusional or do not really care about how the company performs in ...
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Question of the moment 
Sandrine Olivencia
Operae Partners