The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles From the World's Greatest Manufacturer

by Jeffrey K. Liker

A good place for any company to begin the journey to lean is to create continuous flow wherever applicable in its core manufacturing and service processes. Flow is at the heart of the lean message that shortening the elapsed time from raw materials to finished goods (or services) will lead to the best quality, lowest cost, and shortest delivery time. Flow also tends to force the implementation of a lot of the other lean tools and philosophies such as preventative maintenance and built-in quality (jidoka). A lean expression is that lowering the "water level" of inventory exposes problems (like rocks in the water) and you have to deal with the problems or sink. Creating flow, whether of materials or of information, lowers the water level and exposes inefficiencies that demand immediate solutions. Everyone concerned is motivated to fix the problems and inefficiencies because the process will shut down if they don't. Traditional business processes, in contrast, have the capacity to hide vast inefficiencies without anyone noticing—people just assume that a typical process takes days or weeks to complete. They don't realize that a lean process might accomplish the same thing in a matter of hours or even minutes.