14 Management Principles of Toyota

Below are the managerial values and business methods that are known collectively as the Toyota Way. I have used some of them, tried to implement others during my professional life as a Manufacturing and Operations Manager.

I was wondering if they are relevant for the WA community?

May we use some of them for the purpose we all are here?

To grow and improve together, all people here to be involved in continuous problem solving and improvement, which over time trains everyone to become better problem solvers.

In the Toyota Way, it’s the people who bring the system to life: working, communicating, resolving issues, and growing together.

PRINCIPLES

Principle 1. Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

■ Work, grow, and align the whole organization toward a common purpose that is bigger than making money. Your philosophical mission is the foundation for all the other principles.

Principle 2. Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.

■ Redesign work processes to achieve high value-added, continuous flow. Strive to cut back to zero the amount of time that any work project is sitting idle or waiting for someone to work on it.

Principle 3. Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction.

■ Provide your downline customers in the production process with what they want, when they want it, and in the amount they want.

Principle 4. Level out the workload (heijunka). (Work like the tortoise, not the hare.)

■ Eliminating waste is just one-third of the equation for making lean successful. Eliminating overburden to people and equipment and eliminating unevenness in the production schedule are just as important—yet generally not understood at companies attempting to implement lean principles.

Principle 5. Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.

■ Quality for the customer drives your value proposition.

Principle 6. Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.

■ Use stable, repeatable methods everywhere to maintain the predictability, regular timing, and regular output of your processes. It is the foundation for flow and pull.

Principle 7. Use visual control so no problems are hidden.

■ Use simple visual indicators to help people determine immediately whether they are in a standard condition or deviating from it.

Principle 8. Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.

■ Use technology to support people, not to replace people. Often it is best to work out a process manually before adding technology to support the process.

Principle 9. Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.

■ Do not view the leader’s job as simply accomplishing tasks and having good people skills. Leaders must be role models of the company’s philosophy and way of doing business.

■ A good leader must understand the daily work in great detail so he or she can be the best teacher of your company’s philosophy.

Principle 10. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.

■ Create a strong, stable culture in which company values and beliefs are widely shared and lived out over a period of many years.

■ Train exceptional individuals and teams to work within the corporate philosophy to achieve exceptional results. Work very hard to reinforce the culture continually.

Principle 11. Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.

■ Have respect for your partners and suppliers and treat them as an extension of your business.

■ Challenge your outside business partners to grow and develop. It shows that you value them. Set challenging targets and assist your partners in achieving them.

Principle 12. Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation (genchi genbutsu).

■ Solve problems and improve processes by going to the source and personally observing and verifying data rather than theorizing on the basis of what other people or the computer screen tell you.

■ Think and speak based on personally verified data.

Principle 13. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly (nemawashi).

■ Do not pick a single direction and go down that one path until you have thoroughly considered alternatives. When you have picked, move quickly and continuously down the path.

Principle 14. Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen).

■ Once you have established a stable process, use continuous improvement tools to determine the root cause of inefficiencies and apply effective countermeasures.

That's all for now.

Share your opinion about those principles in terms of personal and business life, please!