Toyota Lean Operations Failure

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The foundations of lean operations is routed and combined with the Japanese auto manufacturing company, Toyota. Toyota introduced the Toyota Productions System (TPS) and it was the driver which helped the company to grow (Ohno, 1988). However, later on the concept of TPS was refined and disseminated by the MIT project team and was renamed “lean” (Womack, 1990). Lean operations were firstly developed in the manufacturing industry and a successful implementation would be to promote operational flow efficiency and achieve effective cost reduction ( Portioli, 2010). The main idea of the lean operations is a business system which main goal is to eradicate wastes and to develop constant business flow. In general to accomplish low cost production …show more content…

Companies use lean operations which combine a set of tools, principles, practices and techniques in order to improve their performance (Bayat, 2016). The aim of lean is to improve the delivery, the cost, the quality and the consumers’ needs by reducing the variability, the waste and the inflexibility of a business (Drew, 2004). In fact, it is not easy for a company to adopt a lean strategy and most of them have troubles or fail in the implementation part (Hoyte, 2007). The reason of this failure is explained as an inability to understand the lean principles and essential organizational changes (Robinson, 2009).

Principles of lean operations
The lean principles consist the key for a succeed project of a business and they are used in order to eliminate the waste (Thurston, 2016).There are seven complications which affect the process of waste (Credit Union National Association, 2010). According to Flinchbaugh and to Thurston, there is the overproduction, the inventory, the transportation, the over processing, the waiting time, the unnecessary motion and the defective goods.
1. The overproduction concerns the higher or the sooner production than the required one.
2. The inventory has to do with the excess of inventory in …show more content…

These goals can be reached by creating five principles. According to Jimmerson (2005) these principles are the designate value from the point of view of the end customer by product family, analyze all the stages in the process value flow for each product family, exterminate whenever possible those stages that do not add value, make the value-creating stages ensue in a tight progression to secure that the products flows smoothly towards the customer, as a flow is established, let the customers pull value from the next upstream activity. Finally, once the value is determined, value flow is identified; extravagant stages should be eliminated in order flow and pull to be established. This whole series of actions should be implemented iteratively up until at a specific limit of perfection is reached, in which wastes will not be created anymore and a perfect outcome will be

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