Lean Management Guru – Suaju Ltd – Comment on the Toyota Recall
The principles of Lean Management are not new and in fact have their roots most firmly placed in the history of the Toyota Company of Japan. The use of innovative waste reduction techniques in their factories after the war in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s led to Toyota becoming the father of the modern principles of Lean Production techniques as applied in all areas of endeavour and business across the modern world.
The system of waste reduction always has as its focus the end user, consumer or customer. Anything in the production of the end result that does not enhance or improve the end user’s experience of the product is deemed to be waste. This could be physical resources, time, cleaning or even something as non-physical as management structure or transportation coordination. It all comes under the scrutiny of the concept of lean management.
The situation that Toyota find themselves seems to have come from a parting of the ways regarding their use of these principles in relation to processes based outside the factories in Japan. Some of the functions of their massive production environment have been outsourced and it seems that in some of these areas errors have crept in to the almost infallible Japanese system of checks and cross checks that have allowed a work force of relatively few to produce some of the most reliable cars in the world.
The head of Suaju Ltd, Saleem Ullah, commented today “We, as a company, stand for the principles of Lean Management Strategies. This system of thinking about business processes is so entrenched in the roots of the Toyota Company’s production processes that it has been something of a surprise to hear of the current situation unfolding. We here at Suaju strive for lean principles to be applied in all aspects of our clients businesses. Our lean outsourcing guidelines which we use in most areas of our business including our software outsourcing branch, would have been most useful to Toyota in this situation it would seem. The comments from management that have been in the press lead me to believe that Toyota will use lean techniques to extricate themselves from this situation and probably become stronger and more robust, as a company, because of it.”
The grandson of the founder, Akio Toyoda, said at a press conference recently that he promised to listen to his consumers more and that this was his own ‘kaizen’ or ‘innovation’ presumably along lean principles one would hope.
About Suaju.
Suaju Ltd is an industry leading company based in Bristol.
They offer Lean Consultations, of which the first meeting is free. Renowned for their ability to identify waste and resource miss-use many have been amazed at the savings and results obtained after working with them. They also offer a very efficient Lean based software outsourcing process.
Suaju can be contacted at www.Suaju.com.