Toyota Production System: Muda, Andon Cords and a Post-Katrina Rebuild

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The Toyota Production System took its biggest idea not from Ford or General Motors but from the American supermarket, where customers take only what they need and shelves are refilled only to replace it. Between 1948 and 1975 Taiichi Ohno and the Toyoda family, Sakichi, Kiichiro and Eiji, built a factory philosophy around that pull logic and around war on three enemies: muri (overburden), mura (unevenness) and muda (waste). The episode explains how the three feed each other and walks through the eight wastes, from overproduction, which Toyota treats as the most dangerous, to underutilized workers, defined as wasted human intelligence rather than idle hands.

Toyota's 1992 booklet on TPS, revised in 1998, calls it a framework rather than a how-to manual, resting on two pillars. Just-in-time treats early delivery as a problem, and jidoka traces back to Sakichi Toyoda's loom that stopped itself when a thread broke, which became the andon cord any worker can pull to halt the line. The episode follows a defect through genchi genbutsu, nemawashi, hansei, heijunka and poka-yoke, then turns to Western firms in the 1980s and 1990s that cut inventory without the culture and saw supply chains collapse. It ends with Toyota engineers volunteering at the Food Bank for New York City and with the New Orleans disaster group SBP.

• Ohno's 2007 book Workplace Management says in chapter 15 that delivering parts too early is a problem, and in chapter 23 ties the method to lower cost.
• Traditional American plants followed the rule never stop the line and fixed defects at the end with a separate workforce.
• Nemawashi, going around the roots, means building consensus slowly so a decision can be carried out quickly.
• At the Food Bank for New York City, smaller boxes and a new packing room layout cut wait times for a hot meal.
• Working with Toyota from 2011, SBP cut home rebuild times from 12 to 18 weeks down to six and reduced construction errors by 50 percent.