Redefining the Toyota Production System: the European side of the story

Abstract

Trapped into the sterile opposition between the empowerment and the management by stress approaches, the debate on the Toyota Production System has failed to provide a clear understanding of the social and organisational conditions that make this system viable. By focusing on the work organisation, the market configuration and the industrial infrastructure of the European transplants of Toyota, this paper proposes an alternative approach centred on the notions of 'contextualisation' and 'human agency.'

Plant maintenance management practices in automobile industries: a retrospective and literature review

“…The excellence in equipment maintenance is essential to lean assembly. The Toyota Production System was trapped into the sterile opposition between the empowerment and the management by stress approaches, and has failed to provide a clear understanding of the social and organizational conditions that make this system viable (Pardi, 2007).…”

“…Hansen, 2006 The study is directed to the performance assessment of maintenance department and designing of a feedback system for providing data on planned and unplanned maintenance work. Pardi, 2007 The TPS becomes a much less efficient system on the long run without a stable relationship between the actors of the shop floor as it exerts a constant pressure on the workers and on the team by forcing on them contradictory priorities. Abdallah et al, 2007 TPM should be considered as one of the main pillars for plants implementing JIT production to improve the performance, as JIT production alone cannot yield superior performance results.…”

The Dilemma of Toyota Production System Implementation: A Case Study of Taiwan Machine Tool Industries

“…However, machine tool manufacturers cannot force their customers to establish such favorable conditions like Toyota. Pardi (2007) believes that companies can effectively implement TPS in the condition that market demand is stable and controllable state. Machine tool industry is in the environment that order demand and overall production load are unstable.…”

“…The two important factors of TPS are just in time (JIT) and Jidoka (Womack et al, 1990;Liker and Meier, 2006; Womack and Jones, 1996; Sugimori et al, 1997). Pardi (2007) investigates Toyota production environment, and he finds that enterprise must meet following three facets to implement TPS efficiently: (1) ensure stability of long-term cooperation between company and employees; (2) market demand is stable and under controllable state; (3) reliable resiliency of suppliers. Pardi (2005) studies European Toyota factories and the results show that the factory conditions do not meet the three facets, resulting in the implementation of TPS failure.…”

Quality control chart design under Jidoka

“…In other cases, it may be a managerial policy to force a systemwide stoppage when a single machine is stopped. For example, under the practice of jidoka (also called autonomation), whenever a machine is stopped due to whatever reason, the entire production line is stopped to prevent any value from being added on to any defective units [14,20,24]. Herein we do not differentiate between technical or managerial reasons for system stoppages but, for ease of exposition, refer to the setting with exogenous stoppages as a jidoka setting.…”