Empowering Kanban through TPS-principles – an empirical analysis of the Toyota Production System

Partial and iterative Lean implementation: two case studies

“…Returning to the research objectives, firstly "how does a company use the Lean ideology to achieve their strategic objectives?" (RQ1) Sweeney and Carter (1990) and Thun et al (2010) believe that lean is a necessary step to improve competitiveness. The findings at the food Company support this assertion.…”

“…The argument that partial adoption of lean will inhibit long term potential (Voss and Harrison, 1987) of an organization is therefore questionable. Certainly Thun et al (2010) believe that a fuller implementation of the practices of the Toyota Production System demonstrate superior perceived performance in terms of the key performance criteria of operations: time, cost, quality and flexibility.…”

“…Olhager and West, 2002;Thun et al, 2010). The implementation of techniques on the shop floor was based on practical trial periods rather than theoretical prescriptions deriving from the literature.…”

Completely Taktless! What Is Pull in the Context of the Process Industries?

“…It is interesting to note discussion regarding the lack of process industry lean/pull literature and case implementation in the 1990s (Billesbach 1994; Table 2 Literature summary of pull production characteristics Pull production characteristic Literature discrete manufacture overview Literature process manufacture issues WIP limit Systematically limits releases to limit the total work in the system (Hopp 2008) ensuring system is not overwhelmed • WIP is often bounded by equipment so blocking occurs naturally (Hopp and Spearman 2004) Targeted at reducing cycle time (Little's Law) and both reducing and stabilising lead time (Hopp 2008) and inventory • In a process environment finished product inventory can build as a result of poor flow (King 2009, p. 25) and so like discrete WIP it may also be bounded (Liberopoulos and Dallery 2002) Setup/batch size reduction A consequence of pull-based production is small lot sizes which results in many setups, in turn disrupting flow (Thun et al 2010) • Small batch sizes impact capacity resulting in longer lead times when batch sizes are large, but saturation when batches get so small that setups create a constraint (Kim and Tang 1997;Schragenheim et al 1994;Hopp and Spearman 2004) Changeovers are a source of variation (Bicheno and Holweg 2009) and if the degree of variation is large, scheduling becomes more difficult and both lead time (Lyons et al 2013) and setup waste and maximising asset productivity (King 2009) Cell layout in particular is associated with improving capacity, flow and productivity in the discrete industries (where people = capacity) through waste reduction, line balancing, single piece flow, inventory and movement reduction, visibility and labour flexibility/ productivity (Bicheno and Holweg 2009;Liker 2004) • In the process industries much of this doesn't apply as equipment dictates capacity and is often fixed and inflexible (King 2009) …”

Manufacturing in Japan and From Japan

“…Empirical studies were conducted for evaluating the effectiveness of TPS or LM. Matsui [15] analyzed the effectiveness of JIT in Japanese companies, and Thun et al [16] evaluated TPS principles in utilizing Kanban system empirically. Also, as TPS includes many methodologies, researchers were tried to find the main ideas and methods, and Spear and Bowen [17] and Towill [18] clarified the DNA of TPS.…”