Toyota executive Teruyuki Minoura says that the “T”in TPS stands for “thinking,”and the greatest strength of Toyota’s “Thinking Production System”is the way it develops people.
“Under a ‘push’system, there is little opportunity for workers to gain wisdom because they just produce according to the instructions they are given,”he says. “In contrast, a ‘pull’system asks the worker to use his or her head to come up with a manufacturing process where he or she alone must decide what needs to be made and how quickly it needs to be made.”
Most improvement programs put far too much emphasis on documentation and not nearly enough emphasis on encouraging every person to think every minute about how her or his work situation might be improved. Of course, most companies believe that they encourage workers to think about improvements. For years we have had suggestion systems that encourage workers to write down their good ideas and submit them to the s
For years we have had suggestion systems that encoura