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The classic, nationally bestselling book that first articulated the principles of lean production, with a new foreword and afterword by the authors. When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in 1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Twenty years later Toyota passed GM as the world's largest auto maker. This management classic was the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system that is the basis for its enduring success. Authors Womack, Jones, and Roos provided a comprehensive description of the entire lean system. They exhaustively documented its advantages over the mass production model pioneered by General Motors and predicted that lean production would eventually triumph. Indeed, they argued that it would triumph not just in manufacturing but in every value-creating activity from health care to retail to distribution. Today The Machine That Changed the World provides enduring and essential guidance to managers and leaders in every industry seeking to transform traditional enterprises into exemplars of lean success.… (more)
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The authors divide industrial production into three types or stages. It is implied that these are usually developed sequentially: (1) craft production, (2) mass production, and (3) “Lean” production.
When Henry Ford developed his assembly line method, interchangeable parts, and other improvements in efficiency, mass production replaced craft production for auto manufacturing. The result was a dramatic increase in material gain for society, but with a well recognized diminishment in the quality and satisfaction of work for workers on the assembly line. Several decades later, Japanese auto companies developed new methods that solved some problems of mass production and which also were better suited for the smaller Japanese auto market and for Japanese labor regulations. A prime example of this new approach was the “Toyota Production Method”. The authors write that they coined the term “Lean” to describe these innovations of the Japanese automotive industry over the existing mass production methods. Some readers may recognize the term “Lean” as a corporate buzzword lacking any concrete definition. However, when illustrated by the examples in this book, the concept does gain some credibility.
The charts and tables are easily understood and useful. Clearly a great deal of good research (and data reduction) was done in order to write this book. The book has three authors and credit is also given to several more researchers for some chapters. They tend to brim with self-confidence. For example, about Henry Ford: “Ford himself had absolutely no idea how to organize a global business except by centralizing all decision-making in the one person at the top ...”. Perhaps Ford did have some other ideas, but organizing a global business in the first half of the 20th century may have been a very difficult task. But this attitude is redeemed by the Epilogue in the 2007 edition in which errors or misunderstandings of the first 1990 edition are acknowledged.