Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System (Harvard Business Review).pdf

Decoding the DNA of the
Toyota Production System
by Steven Spear and H. Kent Bowen
Reprint 99509
96 artwork by amy ning
The
he Toyota Production System has
Toyota long been hailed as the source of Toyota’s
story has Toutstanding performance as a manufacturer.
The system’s distinctive practices –its kanban cards
been intensively and quality circles, for instance – have been widely
researched and introduced elsewhere. Indeed, following their own
internal efforts to benchmark the world’s best man-
painstakingly panies, GM, Ford, and Chrysler have
documented, independently created major initiatives to develop
Toyota-like production systems. Companies that
yet what really have tried to adopt the system can be found in fields
happens as diverse as aerospace, consumer products, metals
processing, and industrial products.
inside the What’s curious is that few manufacturers have
company managed to imitate Toyota essfully – even
though pany has been extraordinarily open
remains a about its practices. Hundreds of thousands of exec-
mystery. utives from thousands of businesses have toured
Toyota’s plants in Japan and the United States.
Here’s new Frustrated by their inability to replicate Toyota’s
insight into performance, many visitors assume that the secret
of Toyota’s ess must lie in its cultural roots.
the unspoken But that’s just not the case. Other pa-
rules that nies, such as Nissan and Honda, have fallen short
of Toyota’s standards, and Toyota has essfully
give Toyota introduced its production system all around the
petitive world, including in North America, where -
pany is this year building over a million cars, mini-
edge. vans, and light trucks.
So why has it been so difficult to decode the Toy-
ota Production System? The answer, we believe, is
that observers confuse the tools and practices they
see on their plant visits with the system itself. That
Decoding the makes it impossible for them to re