I'll resist the temptation to beat-on-you for drawing overly detailed
conclusions from a tour of the NUMMI plant, and instead point to a
couple of articles ;-)
Spear, Steven J. (May 2004). "Learning to Lead at Toyota." Harvard
Business Review, 78-86.
Spear, S. and Brown, H.K. (September-October 1999). "Decoding the DNA
of the Toyota Production System." Harvard Business Review, 97-106.
(Harvard Business Review seems to be available in most public
libraries.)
Here's an excerpt:
"...Toyota's real achievement is not merely the creation and use of the
tools themselves; it is in making all its work a series of nested,
ongoing experiments, be the work as routine as installing seats in cars
or as complex, idiosyncratic, and large scale as designing and
launching a new model or factory.
"...standardization - or more precisely, the explicit specification of
how work is going to be done before it is performed - is coupled with
testing work as it is being done. The end result is that gaps between
what is expected and what actually occurs become immediately evident."
Those articles really are worth reading - I see way to many folk
referencing the old James Womack or Taiichi Ono books.
Spear writes:
"few manufacturers have managed to imitate Toyota successfully - even
though the company has been extraordinarily open about its practices.... observers confuse the tools and practices they see on their plant
visits with the system itself. That makes it impossible for them to
resolve an apparent paradox of the system - namely, that activities,
connections, and production flows in a Toyota factory are rigidly
scripted, yet at the same time Toyota's operations are enormously
flexible and adaptable."
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