{domain:"www.qualitydigest.com",server:"169.47.211.87"} Skip to main content

User account menu
Main navigation
  • Topics
    • Customer Care
    • FDA Compliance
    • Healthcare
    • Innovation
    • Lean
    • Management
    • Metrology
    • Operations
    • Risk Management
    • Six Sigma
    • Standards
    • Statistics
    • Supply Chain
    • Sustainability
    • Training
  • Videos/Webinars
    • All videos
    • Product Demos
    • Webinars
  • Advertise
    • Advertise
    • Submit B2B Press Release
    • Write for us
  • Metrology Hub
  • Training
  • Subscribe
  • Log in
Mobile Menu
  • Home
  • Topics
    • 3D Metrology-CMSC
    • Customer Care
    • FDA Compliance
    • Healthcare
    • Innovation
    • Lean
    • Management
    • Metrology
    • Operations
    • Risk Management
    • Six Sigma
    • Standards
    • Statistics
    • Supply Chain
    • Sustainability
    • Training
  • Login / Subscribe
  • More...
    • All Features
    • All News
    • All Videos
    • Contact
    • Training

A Question of Perspective

Why copying Toyota is a bad idea

Tripp Babbitt
Thu, 08/15/2013 - 10:29
  • Comment
  • RSS

Social Sharing block

  • Print
  • Add new comment
Body

S

ometimes it’s necessary for a person to offer up views that seem to be an affront. Because these views often challenge the status quo, people’s reactions can be mixed. Some will consider the person a heretic for expressing them, and others will wonder why anyone would say such a thing. The latter group is the one worth convincing, because the people who comprise it are curious by nature and interested in the truth.

ADVERTISEMENT

So at the risk of affronting, I believe there’s too important a story to be ignored when it comes to Japan: Copying Toyota is a bad idea. Not because I say so, but because if we look at the foundational elements of Japanese manufacturing, we find the work of W. Edwards Deming. Many in the lean community agree that without Deming, there would have been no Taiichi Ohno or Toyota Production System (TPS). The fact that Toyota achieved a set of results is really of no use to another company, even one in a similar industry, unless that company understands how Toyota did it and how that applies to the company’s own issues.

 …

Want to continue?
Log in or create a FREE account.
Enter your username or email address
Enter the password that accompanies your username.
By logging in you agree to receive communication from Quality Digest. Privacy Policy.
Create a FREE account
Forgot My Password

Comments

Submitted by mgraban on Wed, 08/21/2013 - 12:44

Ohno quote

There's an interesting quote from Taiichi Ohno in "Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management," which I was re-reading today...

"You are a fool if you do what I say. You are a greater fool if you don't do as I say. You should think for yourself and come up with better ideas than mine."

The best examples of Lean in healthcare are examples where leaders and organizations learned, but did not blindly copy. Sami Bahri DDS (the "lean dentist") read Deming, Shingo, Ohno, etc. and had to figure this out himself, rather than copying some other dentist.

ThedaCare is the first to say "don't directly copy what we do."

We can learn from others, run our own experiments to see what works, and keep improving to make it better than even Ohno or Shingo would have imagined.

I also wrote about this... in 2010, in my blog post: 

Don’t Copy: There Is No “Instant Pudding”

  • Reply

Submitted by umberto mario tunesi on Tue, 08/20/2013 - 21:22

Is Sun really UP there?

We "see" the Sun is up but it's not astronomically so. It's just the same with many perspectives: temptations to copy demigods are always very strong, including a possibly shameful counterstream swimming. It goes back to school days, when copying appeared to be the easiest way to get rid of heavy burdens: if school means the word applicable to fish, let's then copy up and down, right and left. If schooling means instead to teach and learn, copying is simply out of the question.  

  • Reply

Submitted by JBennettAU on Thu, 08/22/2013 - 21:02

Good article

Good article Tripp.  You make some excellent points.

I particularly like your position that we "owe it to ourselves, and the broader community, to be life-long learners rather than gurus and experts".  Yes indeed!

  • Reply

Submitted by RSchonberger on Sat, 08/31/2013 - 13:50

Copying Toyota?

There surely are good reasons why copying Toyota is a bad idea. Data from Toyota’s annual reports show that the company’s production days of inventory have doubled in the past 20 years—from 17 to 36 days’ supply. In more detail: Toyota’s finished goods and work in process have nearly doubled, and purchased materials have more than tripled. Once hailed as the world’s paragon of lean, Toyota looks in that regard to have slipped to about average among car-makers.

That kind of slippage can have devastating effects on a company’s quality efforts, because a lean-management system is at the same time a quality-management system: The primary beneficial result of lean is reducing waiting times all along the value chains. When wait times plunge, defects and nonconformities show up quickly, before (1) they can multiply into quality disasters, such as massive recalls, and (2) while the root causes may still be active and traceable by the quality-engineering sleuths.

 

Looking at this linkage in reverse, a quality-management system serves at the same time as a lean-management system: Lean is intolerant of wait-time-consuming interruptions, scrap, and rework, and of the high variability in response times that accompany quality incidents and disasters. As Mr. Babbitt alludes to, the works of Dr. Deming had to be woven into the other lean practices.

That knife-and-fork linkage between quality and lean—aka, TPS and JIT—has long been well known and appreciated, and was explained well in the 1982 book, Japanese Manufacturing Techniques. For most of the 1980s it was common in related writings and presentation to find that linkage in the acronym, JIT/TQC (just-in-time/total quality control).

  • Reply

Add new comment

Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.
Please login to comment.
      

© 2025 Quality Digest. Copyright on content held by Quality Digest or by individual authors. Contact Quality Digest for reprint information.
“Quality Digest" is a trademark owned by Quality Circle Institute Inc.

footer
  • Home
  • Print QD: 1995-2008
  • Print QD: 2008-2009
  • Videos
  • Privacy Policy
  • Write for us
footer second menu
  • Subscribe to Quality Digest
  • About Us
  • Contact Us