مدیریت تولید ژاپنی: تکامل با موفقیت چندگانه

Japanese production management (JPM) became a dominant influence in the field of operations management when, in the early 1980s, knowledge of its main elements became known beyond Japan. Those elements – quick set-up, small lots, cells, kanban, and so on – are well known. Rather than explaining them again, this paper's objective is to explore the sequence of events leading to JPM as a competitive force globally, as well as its impact on theory and practices in operations management. JPM's evolution includes shifting terminologies, fusions and adulterations; limited extensions from manufacturing into services and innovative enhancements, largely of Western origin. Longitudinal research data, based on inventory trends, provide insights on JPM's diffusions and its uneven results. Latter-day puzzling lapses and disappointments, among Japanese as well as Western companies, raise questions about JPM's sustainability, as well as some of its changing manifestations. While the core of Japanese production management, now over three decades old, appears to have become solidly mainstream, its current and future states are problematic.

Hundreds of articles in the business press throughout the 1970s presented the problem: the Japanese export Juggernaut was wreaking havoc on Western competition. Ezra Vogel summed up prevailing explanations in his quantum-selling book, Japan as Number1:LessonsforAmerica (1979). Vogel, a social scientist who had lived in Japan for a time after receiving a Harvard PhD, cited enlightened guidance of industry by government ministries, a consensus culture, and other socio-political factors. Vogel failed to mention the keiretsu system—groupings of many mutually supportive businesses: the bank-dominated “big six” horizontal keiretsus, and the more manufacturing-oriented vertical ones (e.g., the Toyota group made up of nearly 250 companies). Others saw the keiretsus, a.k.a., “Japan Inc.”, as a dominant economic force ( Business Week, 1973 and Miyashita, 1994). The notion that production management might also have something to do with the rise of Japan as a first-rate industrial power was still under wraps. Within a year or 2 of publication of Vogel's book, the wraps were off. Western manufacturers, academics, and consultants had been joining study missions to Japan by the planeload. Those from industry were looking for evidence of unique Japanese production management practices, and they found plenty (see, for example, Burnham, 1983). Having grown up in the “silo system” of functional separation, however, few of the observers were able to see Japanese production management (JPM) as a mutually reinforcing set of “best practices.” Rather, what emerged initially was not one, but three versions, each detailed in an outpouring of books and articles in the first few years of the 1980s: