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sebtoast

I've never seen Toyoda mentioned as the inventor of the lean model, I usually seen Taiichi Ohno credited for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiichi_Ohno

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W. Deming also played a pretty large role too[1]. The whole history around Lean/Kaizen/etc is pretty fascinating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Deming was about quality control, which dovetails into lean: you can only do the latter if you know your parts bin is good, and that you can trust your supplier/s to deliver.

In that sense, lean is essentially the same solution as reducing buffer size to increase network throughout.

Excess capacity pooling decreases stopages but prevents signalling of problems back through the chain.

Do you have some links for the history? I'm interested in Lean and Kaizen. Made a comment about it in this thread.

It's covered a little in the TAL episode on NUMMI[1]. There's also a bit of it involved with TWI[2][3]. I'd read some other interesting things about skill transfer post-WW2 with the Marshall Plan but having trouble finding the original source material.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry#Post_...

[3] https://twi-institute.org/training-within-industry/history/

Great, will check those links out, thank you.

This part from your link [2] is interesting:

>In the Foreword to Dinero's book "Training Within Industry", John Shook relates a story in which a Toyota trainer brought out an old copy of a TWI service manual to prove to him that American workers at NUMMI could be taught using the "Japanese" methods used at Toyota. Thus, TWI was the forerunner of what is today regarded as a Japanese creation.

Can't confirm or the reverse, but I do remember Taiichi Ohno's name being mentioned multiple times in the book (The Toyota Way), which I bought and read some years ago. Interesting book.

One of the things mentioned was the concepts of muri and muda, related to (not) wasting (stuff), IIRC [1]. Related to Kaizen [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+word+muri+and+muda&

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muri_(Japanese_term)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mura_(Japanese_term)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

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