In October 1989, my company hosted Total Improvement Process Week, one of the most productive experiences of my career. Our consultant was Ryuji Fukuda, a Deming Prize winner and author of Managerial Engineering (Productivity Inc., 1983), a book I still value for its emphasis on management’s role in continuous improvement. When the chance came to bring Fukuda in for a workshop, we jumped on it.

Discovering the X-type matrix

Among the many topics on Day One of Fukuda’s workshop was a new concept: the X-type matrix for objective management, now simply called the X-matrix. It wasn’t in Fukuda’s book, and I’d never seen it elsewhere. Remember, in 1989, information on the Toyota Production System (TPS) was scarce: no A3s, no value stream maps, no TPS House, and not even a glimpse of Toyota’s own strategic planning process.

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