They have had to look at time based operations as a great significance to their improvement involving the JIT system. This system has now been renamed recently as the lean manufacturing system. What they deduced from this system is that it can be placed into five groups called the five zeros. These five zeros are, zero paper, zero inventories, zero downtime, zero defects and zero delay. What these five zeros actually relate to are to keep plans and inventory to a minimum but also simple and visible, using reliable and flexible processes, keeping within the chain of quality and the speeding up of actual design times and manufacturing time from the start of a project to the finished product. What this basically strives to achieve is a removal of waste and complexity from their operations.
To get nearer to achieving these goals two other components must be involved within the JIT system and these are Total Quality and Total People Involvement. This should be achieved by using quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. As we have learnt JIT cannot work without the use of MRP working alongside it to some degree. The Japanese deduced this fact and instead of using the traditional push systems decided that a Kanban pull system would be more beneficial to their operations. The kanban is used to control the flow of production. Kanban is the Japanese word for card or sign. The system basically works on the process of having a sort of assembly line and the first station cannot hand over any work to the second station until the second station produces a card or sign to authorise receipt of their next job as they are ready to receive it. This kanban pull system is a very good system for detecting problems or bottle necks because they stand out straight away and are very visible to the naked eye. Because these problems or bottlenecks can be detected without delay, continuous improvement and waste elimination can be achieved.
Also by reducing the number of kanbans used the amount of inventory used between workstations is automatically cut. This allowed Toyota to forge a metaphorical war on waste, its causes and eliminating these causes from their operations totally if at all possible. The change from using more skilled operators thus cutting the chances of breakdown occurring through automaton totally bottle necking the production system was another important process implemented by the Japanese. Careful arranging of these skilled operator teams through circumspect analytical processes was also employed. Progress is also easier to achieve if the operator is involved as much in planning the production processes as well as improvement schedules as goes the thinking that two heads are better than one when solving a problem, although Toyota of course used this on a much wider scale.
This in turn leads to greater communication, simplicity and flexibility within the workforce which can lead it to achieving greater heights involving production. This can also have a family sense of belonging among the workforce as sales, profits and production outputs are all produced for the entire workforce to see. Whilst the Japanese realise that the use of people as opposed to just machines is advantageous they also concede that automaton in certain areas can also be of great benefit by the use of things like computer aided design (CAD) to speed up and simplify the design process and also the use of computers to provide data collection for using in the MRP system.
Time and analysis charts can also be produced on the computer to be used in project management processes when planning the overall operations. But still the use of processes related to things such as BPR or Business Process Reengineering fall back on the use of people and that goes right from the top of the company to the bottom and is not just achieved using top management staff. This human approach also; applies to the communications network between suppliers and vendors. Allowing the suppliers to have an input in possible designs and planning can also be useful to a company as the Japanese have found out their advantage as this not only leads to trust and loyalty being developed it also creates a better think tank. The Japanese have realised the need for change, the implementing of JIT, TQM and the BPR principles are all necessary to achieve not only competitiveness in their market but to actually become one of the market leaders regarding Automotive Manufacturing. Toyota got to this state by employing all of the techniques mentioned and if their applied properly should stay at the top for a long time.
