Introduction

I am writing this blog while reading The Toyota Way by Jefferey Liker. I am planning to write some of the key points which I can use in my work and daily activities. To start with I would like to start with the words which Sakichi Toyoda[founder of Toyota Corporation] said to his son Kiichiro:

Everyone should tackle some great project atleast once in their life. I devoted most of my life to inventing new kind of looms. Now it is your turn. You should make an effort to complete something that will benefit the society.

The success of Toyota is a result of the operational excellence and they call it as the Lean Manufacturing. In Toyota they have founded a system called as Toyota Production System(TPS) and this system is based on 14 principles founded by Toyota. These principles are mainly categorized into 4P's i.e Philosophy, Process, People/Partners and Problem Solving.

TPS suggests to always look at any work based on what's exactly required for the end user or your customer. Any process which is not contributing to the end product is called as a non-value added time or process and is considered as waste. The first thing you should do in approaching any process is to map it with your end product and then try eliminating or reducing all the process which do not result in the product. You can achieve this by drawing a simple spaghetti diagram.
This diagram would have all the steps/process required to build a product right from the raw material(scratch) to the end product and all these steps are layed out in the form of blocks. Then you start identifying things which are directly impacting the end product and those which are not. Then start thinking on removing all those wastes which are not directly contributing to the end product. Below diagram is a sample representation of what a spaghetti diagram looks like.



The table below is what Toyota developed before building Lexus. They wanted to enter into the Luxary cars where Mercedes was dominating the area. They came up with a small benchmarking of the key areas which customers looked at for buying a luxary car. I think this could be applied anywhere where we do our work and first look at what our competitors are doing and how can we do better than them.

So much is covered with so few words. This is one of Toyota's Principles which says "Use visual controls so no problems are hidden"

Need to start from Chapter 5