ABOUT

1. Toyota Production System (TPS)

The Toyota Production System (TPS) is an integrated socio-technical system, developed by Toyota that comprises its management, philosophy, and practices. The Toyota Production System organizes manufacturing and logistics for the automobile manufacturer, including interaction with suppliers and customers. The system is a major precursor of the more generic "lean manufacturing." Originally called "just-in-time production," it builds on the approach created by the founder of Toyota, Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kiichiro Toyoda, and the engineer Taiichi Ohno. The principles underlying the TPS are embodied in The Toyota Way.

The main objectives of TPS are to design out overburden (muri) and inconsistency (mura), and to eliminate waste (muda). The most significant effects on process value delivery are achieved by designing a process capable of delivering the required results smoothly; by designing out "mura" (inconsistency). It is also crucial to ensure that the process is as flexible as necessary without stress or "muri" (overburden) since this generates "muda" (waste). The elimination of waste has come to dominate the thinking of many when they look at the effects of the Toyota Production System because it is the most familiar of the three to implement.

Principles of TPS:

Continuous Improvement

Challenge (We form a long-term vision, meeting challenges with courage and creativity.)
Kaizen (We improve our business operations continuously, always driving for innovation and evolution.)
Genchi Genbutsu (Go to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions.)

Respect for People

Respect (We respect others, make every effort to understand each other, take responsibility and do our best to build mutual trust.)
Teamwork (We stimulate personal and professional growth, share the opportunities of development and maximize individual and team performance.)

This system, more than any other aspect of the company, is responsible for having made Toyota the company it is today. Toyota has long been recognized as a leader in the automotive manufacturing and production industry. More recently the Toyota Production System has been combined with elements of Six Sigma (below) to create Lean Six Sigma training programs.

2. Six Sigma

Six Sigma (6 Sigma) is a set of tools and strategies for process improvement originally developed by Motorola in 1986. Six Sigma (6 Sigma) became well known after Jack Welch made it a central focus of his business strategy at General Electric in 1995, and today it is used in different sectors of industry. Six Sigma (6 Sigma) seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization ("Champions", "Black Belts", "Green Belts", "Orange Belts", etc.) who are experts in these very complex methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (cost reduction and/or profit increase).

The term Six Sigma (6 Sigma) originated from terminology associated with manufacturing, specifically terms associated with statistical modeling of manufacturing processes. The maturity of a manufacturing process can be described by a sigma rating indicating its yield or the percentage of defect-free products it creates. A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects (3.4 defects per million). Motorola set a goal of "six sigma" for all of its manufacturing operations, and this goal became a byword for the management and engineering practices used to achieve it.

Features that set Six Sigma apart from previous quality improvement initiatives include:

A clear focus on achieving measurable and quantifiable financial returns from any Six Sigma project.
An increased emphasis on strong and passionate management leadership and support.
A special infrastructure of "Champions", "Master Black Belts", "Black Belts", "Green Belts", etc. to lead and implement the Six Sigma approach.
A clear commitment to making decisions on the basis of verifiable data and statistical methods, rather than assumptions and guesswork.

Six Sigma (6 Sigma) is a registered service mark and trademark of Motorola Inc. As of 2006 Motorola reported over US$17 billion in savings from Six Sigma (6 Sigma). Other early adopters of Six Sigma who achieved well-publicized success include Honeywell (previously known as AlliedSignal) and General Electric, where Jack Welch introduced the method. By the late 1990s, about two-thirds of the Fortune 500 organizations had begun Six Sigma initiatives with the aim of reducing costs and improving quality. More recently Six Sigma has been combined with aspects of the Toyota Production System to create Lean Six Sigma training programs.

3. Performance management (PM)

Performance management includes activities which ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on the performance of an organization, a department, employee, or even the processes to build a product of service, as well as many other areas. PM is also known as a process by which organizations align their resources, systems and employees to strategic objectives and priorities. Performance management as term defined by Dr. Aubrey Daniels in the late 1970s to describe a technology (i.e. science embedded in applications methods) for managing both behavior and results, two critical elements of what is known as performance.

This is used most often in the workplace, can apply wherever people interact — schools, churches, community meetings, sports teams, health setting, governmental agencies, social events and even political settings - anywhere in the world people interact with their environments to produce desired effects. Armstrong and Baron (1998) defined it as a “strategic and integrated approach to increase the effectiveness of companies by improving the performance of the people who work in them and by developing the capabilities of teams and individual contributors.”

Main Benefits:

Direct financial gain:

Grow sales
Reduce costs in the organization
Stop project overruns
Aligns the organization directly behind the CEO's goals
Decreases the time it takes to create strategic or operational changes by communicating the changes through a new set of goals

Motivated workforce:

Optimizes incentive plans to specific goals for over achievement, not just business as usual
Improves employee engagement because everyone understands how they are directly contributing to the organizations high level goals
Create transparency in achievement of goals
High confidence in bonus payment process
Professional development programs are better aligned directly to achieving business level goals

Improved management control:

Flexible, responsive to management needs
Displays data relationships
Helps audit / comply with legislative requirement
Simplifies communication of strategic goals scenario planning
Provides well documented and communicated process documentation

4. Engineering Human Competence

Based on the work of Thomas F. Gilbert, a psychologist who is often known as the founder of the field of performance technology. Gilbert himself defined the term Performance Engineering. Gilbert applied his understanding of behavioral psychology to improve human performance at work and at school. He is best known for his book Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. Gilbert devised HPT when he realized that formal learning programs often only brought about a change in knowledge, not a change in behavior. Other techniques were needed to bring about a lasting change in behavior.

Dr. Gilbert spent a year on a post-doctoral sabbatical working with the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner at Harvard University and with Ogden R. Lindsley in Lindsley's laboratory at Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, MA. Dr. Gilbert received his BA and MA degrees at the University of South Carolina and his PhD in psychology from the University of Tennessee. His specialties were statistics, testing and measurement.

Gilbert applied this model to the world of work and school by observing that Performance is a function of an interaction between a person's Behavior and his/her Environment (P = B x E) and then defining the elements of the ABC model within each of these two domains. He called the resulting model the Performance Engineering Model, and used it to identify opportunities to systematically develop the managerially controllable systems and other factors in the work and school environments which support employee/student performance. These improvements sometimes resulted in dramatic increases in performance. Dr. Gilbert's work has created much of the organizing framework upon which the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) is based. The ISPI award the Thomas F. Gilbert Distinguished Professional Achievement Award, previously called the Outstanding Member and Distinguished Professional Achievement, that was renamed in 1996 in honor of Gilbert.

Lean Concepts