[Book] The Toyota Way

[soong]

In about a week I'm going to start a new job and it will be the first time I've worked for a company that was about making things and selling them. I've always been doing pure tech where the software itself or the service it provides is the business and I'm making it directly. I mentioned this to one of my future coworkers and he recommended to me

Comments

[genuinekfc]

How well does the book cover some of the pitfalls of lean manufacturing?

My dad was managing a manufacturing-type job when just-in-time flow and low-inventory were the latest buzz in the US. It's a good concept for reducing storage costs and such, but hit a major snag in cultural expectations. Suppliers thought they lost face by admitting they couldn't keep up the supply in time. Instead of getting forewarning that a supply would run low, the shortage would hit suddenly with no warning. The resulting stoppage in production added their own costs.

Not that this should affect your plans to simplify your home office. Clearing away stuff you haven't used in a while is very different from the issues when a product can't be completed because a component is in short supply.

[klari]

Plus just in time has the pit fall of selling in big batches. You could get no orders of "Toyotas" and then someone orders 10k ETA 2 weeks.

[soong]

Yeah, you can only make your input inventory as lean as your suppliers are able to supply consistently, and your output inventory as lean as your customers demand is consistent. But, there are often lots of internal steps with internal suppliers and clients and that can be made all lean. Also, there's a strong repeated theme of building a relationship with external suppliers and customers to get them to level the load and be more consistent in their supplying and demanding whenever possible.

[twonky]

"Lean" manufacturing isn't just synonymous with the Toyota way, Toyota invented it and as far as I can tell is still the best practitioner of it in the manufacturing space.

My entire job for the last 4 years has been to try to move my development organization (read: coding) to as lean a process as possible, though all the books I've read to get there have been software focused. The main thing to remember is that Lean isn't a process or practice, it is a set of principles that you must apply to your organization in whatever processes make sense; it is a way of learning from your organization what needs improving and then finding the right ways to improve it. It's a pain. :-)