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Design Business

How Toyota Changed the Way We Make Things

…and how their system was inspired by 1950s American supermarkets

By Rain Noe - August 29, 2018

Something every designer knows is that having less makes you more creative. In fact one of the first things we do when beginning a new project is to figure out what the constraints are; having those boundaries to bump up against forces us to innovate.

A particularly profound example of this, which every industrial design student should study, is how TPS--the Toyota Production System--and their kanban, a/k/a lean manufacturing/just-in-time manufacturing methodology, has influenced how things are made all around the world. Not just by Toyota, that is: I witnessed kanban practices during my visits to German power tool manufacturer Festool as well as Jonathan Ward's amazing Icon facility, and everyone from Pixar to Boeing to IBM has borrowed from TPS.

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So what exactly is TPS, and why does it work so well? In this video, Bloomberg succinctly explains not only the system, but how it came about--as a result of having less resources:

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Rain Noe

Rain Noe is a writer and industrial designer based in New York City.

3 Comments

Brad Johnson

6 months ago

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I am I the only one who thought of the Ron Howard film "Gung Ho"? Lol

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Alex Netz

6 months ago

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Excellent stuff, in engineering school “ the toyota way” and “the goal” where required reading and as well as other itinerationsof continuos improvement. The actual toyota system fell a little out of favor between 2009 and 2012 after the infamous sticky pedals incidents that harmed toyota’s reputation. The principals are solid and used in every good plant, but are not necessarily named after toyota.

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Louis Leblanc

6 months ago

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For those interested in the subject, have a look at The Machine That Changed the World by Daniel Roos and James P. Womack. They were the ones that brought the Lean Manufacturing systems of the Japenese car manufacturers to light in the 1980's to the Western world. They had lead an international study based in MIT over several years on the subject which lead to their writing of this book.

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