From Taylorism to Lean

1962

General Motors open the

Fremont Assembly Plant

1982

Fremont Plant Shut Down

labor relations almost completely broken down
workers drinking and gambling on the job

Congress threatens to restrict imports

1984

Toyota and General Motors join to open NUMMI

Toyota agrees to re-hire union leaders from Fremont Assembly Plant

*Not the same Bruce Lee

Workers

fly

Japan to learn the TPS

Eiji Toyoda

1913-2013

NUMMI plant producing near-perfect quality cars
some of the best quality in America
as good as those coming from Japan
at a much lower cost than Freemont Assembly had achieved
Lee had been right in his bet

Three month later

"It was the system that made it bad, not the people"

Highest priority: quality

TPS Principle

Problems must be fixed ASAP

Workers can summon the manager to come and help to try to resolve the problem within time available

If not fixed in time, workers can stop production until fixed

Team will later experiment wth ideas to prevent the problem from occuring again

Andon Cord stops production
Activated by workers or equipement
Now part of the Lean approach

TPS Revolution

Primary task of managers: help workers

Workers have the power to stop the line

They should be involved in how to improve the system

Recurring theme: teamwork

Frederick Taylor

1856-1915

Scientific Management

"Taylorism"

Management job: analyze the work and break it down into discrete tasks
Tasks are performed by specialized workers
Workers need to understand nothing more than how to do their particular specialzed task as efficiently as possible
Fundamentally thinks of organizations as machines
High level of managerial control over employee work practices
High ratio of managers / laborers
Obsolete by the 1930s

TPS

Workers and managers collaborate across functions to constently improve - and sometimes radically redesign - the system
High trust culture focused on continuous improvement (kaizen)
Everybody is aligned in their goal of building high quality product

Essential to building a large organization that can adapt rapidly to changing conditions

Taylorism

Makes workers into cogs in a machine, paid simply to perform preplanned actions as quickly as possible

TPS

Requires workers to pursue mastery through continuous improvement, imbues them with a higher purpose - ever higher levels of quality, value and customer service - and provides a level of autonomy by empowering them to experiment with improvement ideas and to implement those that work

Rick Madrid

worked both at the Fremont plant both before and during the NUMMI era

TPS changed my life from being depressed, bored - and like my son said, it changed my attitude. It changed all for the better.

Straightforward ?

Actually, very hard to adopt !

Changes to hierarchy
Removal of visible trappings and privileges of management
No more ties at the plant, to emphasize the fact that everybody was part of the same team
Everybody has to learn all the jobs required of their team and rotate through them

Van Nuys plant

Same problems as in Fremont
Failed to adopt the system
Workers and managers rebelled in face of changes
They simply "didn't believe that otherwise it would shut down"
Closed in 1992

General Motors

Took 15 years to decide they needed to seriously prioritize implementing the TPS
Further 10 years to actualy implement it
It was too late
GM bankrupts in 2009