The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer

How to speed up business processes, improve quality, and cut costs in any industry

In factories around the world, Toyota consistently makes the highest-quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer, while using fewer man-hours, less on-hand inventory, and half the floor space of its competitors. The Toyota Way is the first book for a general audience that explains the management principles and business philosophy behind Toyota’s worldwide reputation for quality and reliability.

Complete with profiles of organizations that have successfully adopted Toyota’s principles, this book shows managers in every industry how to improve business processes by:

• Eliminating wasted time and resources
• Building quality into workplace systems
• Finding low-cost but reliable alternatives to expensive new technology
• Producing in small quantities
• Turning every employee into a qualitycontrol inspector

• How to double or triple the speed of any business process
• How to build quality into workplace systems
• How to eliminate the huge costs of hidden waste
• How to turn every employee into a quality control inspector
• How to dramatically improve your products and services!

With a market capitalization greater than the value of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler combined, Toyota is also, (by far), the world’s most profitable automaker. Toyota’s secret weapon is Lean production–the revolutionary approach to business processes that it invented in the 1950’s and has spent decades perfecting. Today businesses around the world are implementing Toyota’s radical system for speeding up processes, reducing waste, and improving quality.
The Toyota Way, explain’s Toyota’s unique approach to Lean–the 14 management principles and philosophy that drive Toyota’s quality and efficiency-obsessed culture. You’ll gain valuable insights that can be applied to any organization and any business process, whether in services or manufacturing. Professor Jeffrey Liker has been studying Toyota for twenty years, and was given unprecedented access to Toyota executives, employees and factories, both in Japan and the United States, for this landmark work. The book is full of examples of the 14 fundamental principles at work in the Toyota culture, and how these principles create a culture of continuous learning and improvement. You’ll discover how the right combination of long-term philosophy, process, people, and problem solving can transform your organization into a Lean, learning enterprise–the Toyota Way.

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