تبارشناسی تولید ناب

Lean production not only successfully challenged the accepted mass production practices in the automotive industry, significantly shifting the trade-off between productivity and quality, but it also led to a rethinking of a wide range of manufacturing and service operations beyond the high-volume repetitive manufacturing environment. The book ‘The machine that changed the World’ that introduced the term ‘lean production’ in 1990 has become one of the most widely cited references in operations management over the last decade. Despite the fact that the just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing concept had been known for almost a decade prior, the book played a key role in disseminating the concept outside of Japan. While the technical aspects of lean production have been widely discussed, this paper sets out to investigate the evolution of the research at the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) that led to the conception of the term ‘lean production’. Furthermore, the paper investigates why – despite the pre-existing knowledge of JIT – the program was so influential in promoting the lean production concept. Based on iterating series of interviews with the key authors, contributors and researchers of the time, this paper presents an historical account of the research that led to the formulation and dissemination of one of the most influential manufacturing paradigms of recent times.

In reviewing how the lean production concept was formulated and disseminated several striking facts about the mode and lead-time of adopting complex industrial practices have been revealed. One might argue that it took the Western manufacturing world nearly four decades to realise and address the superiority of Japanese manufacturing methods, yet this view is skewed. First, the lean concept itself was not a single-point invention, but the outcome of a dynamic learning process that adapted practices emanating from the automotive and textile sectors in response to environmental contingencies in Japan at the time (Cusumano, 1985 and Fujimoto, 1999). As such, TPS was not formally documented until 1965–1970 (in Japanese) and 1977 (in English). Second, while the academic interest in Japanese manufacturing techniques reached a peak in 1977–1983 with a comprehensive set of publications on JIT and TPS (see timeline in Appendix B), there was little interest by the Western manufacturers. The main reason behind the apparent ‘ignorance’ outside of academic circles in the early 1980s can be explained best by the fact that there was little need to be concerned about the competition from Japan until the oil crises saw a drastic increase in imports that started to threaten the domestic manufacturers. Even then frequent suggestions by leading researchers that Japan's competitiveness was derived from superior manufacturing performance were met with denial, and it was IMVP's comprehensive methodology and dataset that allowed a like-for-like comparison. In many ways the global assembly plant study results did not provide any fundamentally new insights, but they provided unequivocal empirical proof. Coupled with the visible success of the Japanese transplant operations in the U.S., it was now undeniable that lean practices not only yielded superior performance, but that these practices were not culturally bound to Japan and thus indeed transferable to other countries and organisations. Further factors that differentiated the ‘Machine’ from previous books on JIT/TPS and made it such a powerful vehicle for disseminating the lean production message were the coincidence of its publication with a major crisis of the U.S. auto industry, its accessibility to practitioners by avoiding the technical language common to previous books, and a scope that went beyond manufacturing and provided a much larger remit than operational improvement in the factory. One could argue that the ‘Machine’ was a rather simplistic representation of the wealth of research undertaken by IMVP, a point reinforced if one compares the introduction of Krafcik's (1988b) paper and his discussion of industrial stereotypes with the main message of the ‘Machine’. This argument misses the point though, as most crucially the ‘Machine’ book provided the industry with ‘a story of fear and hope’ at a time when it was obvious that the manufacturing industry was in distress. It graphically illustrated the extent to which the West was being overtaken by Japan and its superior manufacturing techniques, yet also provided hope that by adopting lean techniques this trend could be halted. It essentially made the manager the decisive element in the system determining whether his or her company would ‘become a Toyota’ or not, and hence set a clear vision for improvement in many organisations.