The Guidebook to Toyota's 13 Pillars System

Toyota Motor Corporation created a production system that aims to achieve high-quality products, minimize expenses, and shorten the time it takes to make them by reducing waste. TPS consists of two main components, just-in-time and jidoka, and is usually represented by the "house" image shown on the right. To make TPS better and keep it working well, we follow a process called PDCA or the scientific method. We do this by repeatedly doing standardized work and making small improvements called kaizen.

The development of TPS is attributed to Taiichi Ohno, who was in charge of production at Toyota after World War II. Ohno started implementing TPS at Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with machining operations. He then expanded its use to other areas within the company and shared it with other suppliers during the 1960s and 1970s. Outside of Japan, spreading started in a serious way when Toyota and General Motors created a partnership called NUMMI in California in 1984.

The ideas of just-in-time (JIT) and jidoka were developed before the war. Sakichi Toyoda, who started the Toyota group of companies, came up with the idea of jidoka a long time ago. He did this by adding a device to his automatic looms that would make the loom stop if a thread broke. This made things a lot better in terms of quality and allowed people to focus on more important work instead of just watching machines for quality. Over time, this simple idea became a part of every machine, every production line, and every Toyota operation.

Kiichiro Toyoda, the son of Sakichi and the person who started the Toyota car company, came up with the idea of JIT (Just-in-Time) in the 1930s. He ordered that Toyota should not have too much extra inventory and that Toyota will try to work together with suppliers to have a consistent production level. Ohno led the development of JIT, a special system to manage production and control overproduction.

TPS became well-known when The Machine That Changed the World was published in 1990. This book was the result of five years of research led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The scientists at MIT discovered that TPS was much better and faster than traditional mass production. It was such a big change that they called it lean production to show how different it was.