The History of Lean (Part 1)

I have recently sorted myself out and started writing something again. When learning a new piece of knowledge, I always like to trace it back to its source. I want to know where salt makes it salty and vinegar makes it sour. Why does this knowledge appear and what is its essence? I am going to divide this series into three parts:

(Part 1) Introducing the history of Toyota and why Lean originated in Japan

(Middle) Introducing Deming’s total quality management and Lean is inextricably linked

(Part 2) Introducing how Americans spread the word “Lean” to the world after studying Toyota

In today’s IT industry, There are many hot words, “Lean” is one of them, including Lean Entrepreneurship, Lean Service, Lean Accounting, Lean Enterprise, Lean This and Lean That, but where does “Lean” come from and what does it represent?

When talking about lean, Toyota must be mentioned.

Nowadays, the development of our national automobile industry is in full swing, but the accumulation of hundreds of years has allowed various giants to build many fortresses. As a latecomer, China basically wants to catch up in this era of gasoline engines. It's no longer possible. But historically, Toyota has achieved this successfully. Starting in the 1980s, Toyota gradually surpassed General Motors and Ford, and finally succeeded in becoming one of the giants.

Toyota Motor Company was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in the 1930s. Before that, Toyota manufactured textile machinery. Today, textile machinery and automobiles are the two most important businesses of the Toyota Group.

As a latecomer, Toyota faces a situation similar to that of current Chinese automobile companies. Facing giants such as General Motors and Chrysler, Toyota can only do reverse engineering (copycat). Toyota's first car, the A1, built in 1935, copied Chrysler's airflow in appearance, copied the engine from Chevrolet, and copied the chassis and electrical from Ford. Anyway, this car was not popular in the market due to poor quality, and Toyota faced the dilemma of going bankrupt just after it was founded.

Looking at this period of history, except for the last period when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, everything above is similar to the Chinese car brands in previous years.

If you are a little more sensitive and connect the two keywords "30s" and "Japan", you can have a premonition of what is about to happen. Yes, it is the eight-year Anti-Japanese War that started in 1937 . During the war, all manufacturing industries in a country will serve the military. Toyota also produced a large number of military trucks for the Japanese army during the war. Toyota, which made war fortune, got out of the predicament on the verge of bankruptcy.

As the eight-year war of resistance came to an end, the United States, whose tail was stepped on at Pearl Harbor, carried out inhumane ravages on Japan, which lasted from 1944 to 1945 when Japan surrendered. The most destructive bombing in history, the entire Japanese industry was reduced to ashes in the sound of artillery fire.

After five years of sinking, a young automotive engineer Eiji Toyoda came to Ford in 1950. This was also the second time Toyota visited Ford after his uncle Kiichiro Toyoda came to learn from it in 1929. After studying at Ford for three months and returning to Japan, Eiji Toyoda, as an excellent engineer, conducted an in-depth analysis of Ford, the world's best car company at the time, and put forward his own insights - just follow their way of playing. , we have no chance.

Why on earth is there no chance? It is necessary to consider the environment of the automobile market in the United States and Japan. The United States has a large land, rich resources, and a large population, but oil prices are still cheap. The American middle class that has rapidly emerged after World War II is also increasing its consumption of automobiles. This has created a big trend: Ford only needs to produce at full capacity. Just the same model of car is enough. Fewer categories and larger quantities. Controlling costs and increasing production capacity are Ford's unremitting pursuit. The high-volume automobile production method, as the most advanced production method at the time, also spread to automobile manufacturers throughout the United States and other parts of the world.

Only when I arrived in Japan, the situation became a little different.

How big is the land area of ??Japan? It only takes four hours to drive from the east coast to the west coast. Small territory and poor resources are the current situation faced by all Japanese industries. Although the land area is small and the population is not as large as that of the United States, the demand for automobiles has not diminished because of this. As the saying goes, "a sparrow is small but has all the internal organs." , government cars, civilian cars, large trucks, small trucks, there are no shortage of varieties. On the contrary, due to the high population density, a car model such as "K-Car" that is only available in Japan has been derived.

At that time, there were also voices in Japan to promote mass production in the automobile industry. The government even proposed that the Ministry of International Trade and Industry take the lead to unite more than a dozen automobile companies in Japan to launch a large-scale In mass production, each company divides labor to produce different types of cars, thus avoiding competition with each other. Each company only needs to produce a fixed number of cars, and mass production can be achieved.

What will happen if mass production is implemented in Japan?

Let’s start with the conclusion: If we do this, Japan’s automobile industry will be dead.

The premise of this conclusion is that the key factor in mass production is a large amount of cheap labor.

Let’s take a look at the workplace situation in Japan.

To this day, Japan’s workplace has unique characteristics, which consist of three parts:

1. Lifetime employment system

This system It has the following characteristics: hiring fresh graduates, hiring on the basis of comprehensive ability, and those who are hired take the initiative to dedicate their lives to the company, but the company must protect their lifelong career as a prerequisite. ——It’s basically a contract of sale, and it’s two-way. This makes the Japanese very cautious about joining the job, because once they join the job, it is a lifelong matter, and many Japanese people will never think about changing jobs throughout their lives.

2. Seniority-based system

The so-called seniority-based system is closely related to the lifetime employment system. It is a system in which employees’ wages and positions are determined based on the number of years of continuous employment in the company. ——In human terms, it is "ranking based on seniority." It is not difficult to understand why in many Japanese dramas, when the section chief retires or is killed, many people celebrate, because only new carrots can get in after being tricked.

3. No immigrants

In Western countries, a large number of immigrants have taken on the role of low-level workers, but Japan is not a country of immigrants, which means that it cannot enjoy the benefits of large-scale immigrants in the West. Dividends for immigrants who have become the core of the labor force in mass production enterprises.

In such a workplace environment, if Japan adopts a mass production model, the end result will be that after the advantage of cheap labor is gradually lost, it will have no advantage in technological innovation and domestic competition will be weak. Unless the government imposes trade barriers, it will eventually be eliminated by the giants in the international market competition.

Fortunately, Japan's domestic automobile companies, including Toyota, did not adopt the government's suggestions and still insisted on being self-reliant and producing in a "small batch, multi-category" manner.

Soon Toyota faced specific difficulties: if different types of parts were needed, the molds for stamping parts needed to be replaced. Therefore, American automobile companies would stamp at full capacity after replacing them once. , do not start changing molds until you can earn back the cost. Others produce millions of parts a year, all of the same category. Toyota cannot do that. A single category is only a fraction of others.

Then change molds frequently. It’s tiring, but changing molds is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task that requires expert guidance. If you really have to do this, it will become a three-day job. The fish are dried on the net for two days. It's not a big deal to leave Ford alone for two days, because they will be fishing for several months. Toyota would be crazy to do this.

If ordinary people encounter such a situation, they may have to find ways to increase production capacity, or tell customers: We will not discuss orders of less than 100 vehicles. But this is the Japanese, who are famous all over the world. Faced with this dilemma, Ohno Taiichi said: "I want small batches." So starting from the 1940s, Ohno Taiichi drilled After 10 years of hard work, we had to reduce the time for mold change. During this period, we purchased a large number of old American machines and conducted repeated experiments. Finally, we shortened the mold change time from one day to 3 minutes without the need for expert intervention.

This story is just a microcosm of the entire Toyota Production System (TPS). Due to the limitations of the market environment at that time, Toyota chose the most difficult path: small batches and multiple categories. At the same time, subject to limited capital and resources in post-war Japan, Toyota chose to do its best to reduce costs and not waste any labor and resources.

Taiichi Ohno joined Toyota in 1932, when it was still manufacturing textile machines, and was transferred to Toyota Motor in 1943. Because he theorized and systematized Toyota's production system, he was regarded as "Toyota" Production System (TPS)".

The book "Onsite Taiichi Ohno's On-site Management" was published in 1982. It expounded many of Ohno Taiichi's fragmented views in the form of short articles, such as "Farming people prefer inventory", "Reducing production is also can improve productivity”, “difficulties inspire wisdom”, “machines should be able to be stopped at any time”.

A few years later, in 1988, Taiichi Ohno wrote another book called "Toyota Production System", and TPS officially became a term and went global.

However, until now, it is very difficult for the whole world to understand TPS, which is not surprising.

Firstly, it is because TPS is the product of Toyota trying to survive in the cracks and constantly trying to find the best corners. It is related to the market environment and Japan's own culture. To put it bluntly, it was forced out. , is the result of continuous improvement. Just like our elders, they can always make delicious food out of seemingly unpalatable ingredients and always make full use of the ingredients. This is not because they have experienced an era of food scarcity and have no choice but to do so.

Secondly, it was Toyota's own intention. Ohno Taiichi himself mentioned: "Our original intention was to find a unique way suitable for the Japanese economic environment, but we did not want to let other companies, especially It is because we don’t want advanced countries to understand it easily, or even let them leave a complete concept.

"

Taiichi Ohno was extremely confident in the Toyota Production System. At the beginning of his book "Toyota Production System", he wrote a recommendation for his book: "If Henry Ford I was still alive, he would A management model similar to the Toyota Production System must be adopted. "At the same time, in the last paragraph of the original preface, Ohno Taiichi wrote: "Some people misinterpret the Toyota Production System and then criticize it. I will not make any excuses or explanations for this, because I firmly believe that everything in the world can be determined by history. Make a conclusion. ”

Interestingly, in the original preface, Ohno Taiichi left this sentence among the limited sentences: “...Part of the Toyota Production System has been misunderstood, or everyone has taken what he likes.” Necessarily abused. The most obvious example is the one-sided understanding of the Toyota Production System as the Kanban method. ...It is completely contrary to the ideas of Toyota Production System. ”

Let’s deduce the practices of Toyota Production System, starting from the two pillars of TPS mentioned by Ohno Taiichi himself:

1. Just-in-time

2. Automation

The goal of just-in-time is that when parts are needed at any link, they can be delivered on time in the required quantity and at the required moment, no more, no less, and no earlier. It's not too late, in other words, "zero inventory". In order to achieve this goal, Toyota people found that the production plan was distributed to each process, and the method of sending parts from the previous process to the next process would not work. The idea of ??"automatic production" came into being, and the entity and means of its implementation is "kanban".

The so-called "automatic" means that the machine can stop in time when defective products appear, and the problems can be discovered and resolved Solve it in place. When a machine breaks down, instead of allowing defective products to continue production, or stopping and letting manpower replace the machine to continue production, the entire production line is stopped and repaired intensively, allowing the machine to continue automated production. . Not only the defects in the deliverables need to be eliminated immediately, but the hidden problems in the machine also need to be asked "5 whys" to find the root cause and be eliminated immediately. This is "systems thinking" and "continuous improvement" .

The process of discovering and solving problems requires the guidance of "on-site management" by "managers as teachers" to improve the capabilities of each employee and prevent the generation of false information. < /p>

"On-time" and "self-service" are not separate from each other. Ohno Taiichi made an analogy: Just like the players in a baseball game, the achievement of "on-time" requires Downstream collaboration, information sharing, and responsibility responsibilities are to bring into play the spirit of collaboration among team members; and "self-improvement" is to continuously improve and eliminate ineffective work and prevent the production of substandard products, which requires every employee It is necessary to understand the situation of "standard operations" in daily life. When an abnormal situation occurs, managers are like coaches. By finding the root cause and then formulating an improvement plan to prevent this abnormal situation from happening again, it is to continuously improve the team members. approach to individual abilities.