The Evolution Of A Manufacturing System At Toyota

What is the real source of a firm's long-term competitive advantage in manufacturing? Many researchers have focused on routine practices such as total quality management, kaizen, and just-in-time systems, but few have systematically investigated how certain high-performing companies built clearly superior manufacturing capabilities over time. Through original field studies, historical research, and statistical analyses, this book shows how the Toyota Motor Corporation built-and continues to build-distinctive capabilities in production, product development, and supplier management as part of a total system. Author Takahiro Fujimoto identifies evolutionary learning capability as the real source of Toyota's long-term manufacturing advantage. Current demonstrations of this dynamic capability include Toyota's new assembly-line concept, which aims at a better balance of employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Toyota found in the early 1990s that its assembly lines, known for world-class efficiency, could no longer attract a sufficient number of domestic workers, owing partly to a long-term labor shortage. Toyota responded to this problem by instituting a number of changes aimed at making plants more worker-friendly and worker-motivating. By pursuing all kinds of evolutionary paths such as trial and error, opportunistic learning, and rational planning, Toyota managed to articulate a new assembly concept that was more meaningful and less demanding-even to aged workers. Once again, Toyota was arguably the first Japanese company to come up with a systematic approach to this assembly problem. Fujimoto reinterprets the resource-capability view of the firm and uses an evolutionary perspective to show how an effective total manufacturing system creates sustainable competitive advantages. Scholars and students of strategy, operations, and technology management, as well as practitioners in the automobile industry, will find The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota insightful and highly informative. "Taka Fujimoto has produced the best explanation of how Toyota's remarkable system emerged and how it has renewed itself over many years. Anyone involved in the design and production of complex products will learn valuable lessons from The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota." - James P. Womack, Director, Lean Enterprise Institute "Professor Fujimoto is one of the leading scholars on the automobile industry. His book provides insight not only into the genesis and working of Toyota's system, but also the interactive roles of history, rational design, and competitive pressures from markets in the making of economic organizations and institutions in general." - Masahiko Aoki, Stanford University