Page 292 - (DK) The Business Book

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IN CONTEXT
COSTS DO NOT EXIST FOCUS
Waste reduction
TO BE CALCULATED. KEY DATES
1908 The Model T Ford
automobile is mass produced
COSTS EXIST TO BE on an assembly line by the
Ford Motor Company in
Detroit, MI.
REDUCED 1950 W. Edwards Deming

trains engineers and managers
(including Akio Morita, the
LEAN PRODUCTION co-founder of Sony) in process
and quality control in Japan.

1961 Robots are first used on
an assembly line at a General
Motors plant in Ewing
Township, NJ.
2006 US management
consultants McKinsey
& Company publish an
influential report urging
governments to apply lean
production techniques to the
delivery of public services so
taxpayers get more for less.

n business, ideas for new
products and production
I techniques tend to emerge
during times of crisis when the
old products and methods have
become unprofitable. This is the
case with “lean production,” a
method of planning for demand by
reducing waste, developed in Japan
by the Toyota Motor Corporation
in the 1950s. At that time, Toyota
was a relatively inefficient producer
of cars. Like many other Japanese
companies, Toyota was struggling
to overcome the shortages created
by an economy that had been
devastated by war. Looking for
ideas, Toyota sent a young
engineer, Eiji Toyoda, to the US to