No. At least not to the discriminating eye.
Professor Yasuhiro Monden studied Toyota’s production system in the early 1980s. As part of his research he had direct contact with Taiichi Ohno and his disciples, and communicated with them in Japanese. In his book, Toyota Production System: Practical Approach to Production Management (first edition, 1983, page 2), Monden characterizes TPS this way:
“…although cost-reduction is the system’s most important goal, it must achieve three other sub-goals in order to achieve its primary objective. They include:
1. Quantity control, which enables the system to adapt to daily and monthly fluctuations in demand in terms of quantities and variety;
2. Quality assurance, which assures that each process will supply only good units to subsequent processes;
3. Respect-for-humanity, which must be cultivated while the system utilizes the human resources to obtain its cost objectives.
It should be emphasized here that these three goals cannot exist independently or be achieved independently without influencing each other or the primary goal of cost reduction. It is a special feature of the Toyota production system that the primary goal cannot be achieved without realization of the subgoals and vice versa. All goals are outputs of the same system; with productivity as the ultimate purpose and guiding concept, the Toyota production system strives to realize each of the goals for which it has been designed.”
This is consistent with what I learned from Shingijutsu more than twenty years ago.
In their influential 1990 book, The Machine that Changes the World: The Story of Lean Production, Womack, Jones, and Roos presented “lean production” as a term synonymous with TPS (and therefore left undefined). Today, “Lean” is generally regarded as a generic term for TPS, but is not necessarily synonymous. Is something presented as the same actually the same? If company A were to practice Lean and company B were to practice TPS, all other things being equal, would the outcomes be the same? I don’t think so.
In their influential 1996 book Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Womack and Jones used the term “lean thinking” to describe what they had learned in their research about the people who were creating Lean organizations. They defined “lean thinking” as consisting of the following five principles that guided people’s actions (pp. 10 and 16-26):
- Specify Value
- Identify the Value Stream
- Flow
- Pull
- Perfection
Subsequent definitions and characterizations can be found here. This is inconsistent with what I learned from Shingijutsu more than twenty years ago.
Therefore, the term “lean production,” in my understanding, represents an interpretation of the Toyota Production System that is lower fidelity than TPS itself. The difference between the two may be the difference between failure or limited success and overcoming infinite successive challenges to enjoy greater success.
In particular, “lean production” missed some critically important elements of TPS. While now recognized (or more fully recognized), these elements remain less important in Lean that they are in TPS.
- Kaizen
- Respect for people
- Human energy, enthusiasm, and passion for improvement
- Evolution in mindset and methods
- Infinite nature of improvement
- Hunger for survival
Together, I call these “the umami of TPS,” where umai (うまい) means “delicious” and mi (味) means “taste.” Without these, Lean can taste sweet some of the time, but most of the time there are strong tastes of sourness, saltiness, and bitterness – especially for employees.
Lean = TPS – umami. Add umami, “delicious taste,” to Lean and you come much closer to TPS. Please try that.
from Bob Emiliani http://www.bobemiliani.com/is-lean-the-same-as-tps/
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