The translation for Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management is complete! One week behind original plan, but we are on track for a ship date in early March. Here are a few excerpts of the wisdom and insight of Taiichi Ohno I thought you might find enjoy:

Chapter 9: Reduced Inventory, Increased Work in Process

Just as in the example of the press earlier, the calculation tells you that it costs less to produce 10,000 than to produce 1,000 pieces so they keep the machine fully utilized. Then they run out of places to put things. They have no space unless they build a warehouse, so they build a warehouse. Once they have a warehouse they will keep building parts they will not sell just because their calculations tell them they are producing the parts at a low cost. Eventually as both the variety and volume of parts increase, they build racks in the warehouse to hold these parts. And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for, they install a computer system that will retrieve these parts from the warehouse without error, at the push of a button. Why do they go to such lengths to add cost to the parts they think they made so inexpensively?

Chapter 14: Do Kaizen When Times Are Good

I will say this again: the only way to generate a profit is to improve business performance and profit through efforts to reduce cost. This is not done by making workers slave away, to use a bad expression from the olden days, or to generate a profit by pursuing low labor costs but by using truly rational and scientific methods to eliminate waste and reduce cost. I think this is the most important work that industrial engineers can do.

Chapter 19: Toyota Made the Kanban System Possible

What I was particularly worried about was the support of upper management for such a risky, unproven approach that was off the beaten track. They should have been too afraid to give permission, but I think one of the big forces behind the development of the Toyota System is the fact that Chairman Eiji Toyoda and the late Advisor Shoichi Saitoh let me try this to my heart’s content.

If I had not been at Toyota Motor Company, I think another company would never have let me try this, so Toyota made the completion of this system possible. Today it is called the Toyota System but I think it was around 1961 or 1962 that this name was adopted. Before that since it was so risky and we were afraid that one mistake could lead to the company going out of business, so we had called it the Ohno System.

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