Toyota's Improvement Thinking from the Inside

This book helps close the gap in how organizations think about and implement Toyota's continuous improvement methods and management system. The Toyota Production System (TPS) is often viewed and adopted in organizations as a collection of tools to remove waste and streamline processes to provide products or services faster, better, or cheaper. While the tools for improvement and management routines are important, they are not where the true power of the system lies. The author's eight-year journey inside Toyota was full of experiences that developed the power for continuous improvement. These learnings are rarely if ever captured in books on lean or taught in business and engineering classrooms.

This book describes, in part, how Toyota, through its coaches and leaders, develops its members' capabilities through a series of continuous improvement (kaizen and problem-solving) activities. For many members of Toyota, this process results in a personal transformation that ultimately leads to organizational transformation.

This book presents a model for organizational transformation that includes technical systems, organizational principles/values, and spirituality/mindset to achieve enduring high performance. This book shifts from the continuous improvement development way at Toyota to case studies illustrating the thinking and mindset to other organizations on their journey to transformation. It uses the TPS tools as an entry point for development and highlights the role that organizational values play in the pace of transformation. Several case studies are presented that include manufacturing (performance improvement of a production line), healthcare (improvement in neurosurgery patient flow), and education (improvement in standardized test scores).

The key benefit of this book is that it provides insights into Toyota's culture and improvement thinking to help other organizations reach enduring high performance. The book is written for a wide audience so that readers outside of manufacturing organizations can understand the broad applicability of the Toyota way. In addition, it is written succinctly to help readers and practitioners focus their transformation efforts.

Sarah K. Womack is a distinguished researcher and consultant in the field of Industrial Engineering. Her Ph.D. in the department of Industrial & Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor focused on the intersection of lean manufacturing practices and ergonomics. She has published peer-reviewed articles, presented as guest speaker at conferences and universities, and facilitated copious workshops on lean manufacturing. She has established herself as a leading scholar and consultant of one of the world's most coveted management systems, the Toyota Production System. She spent eight years on a journey in various leadership roles of "learning by doing" under some of the world's greatest lean thinkers at Toyota. Applying Toyota's management thinking, she consults across an array of industries with an innovative and practical approach to continuous improvement, organizational transformation, and operational excellence - coaching at every level from the C-suite to the shopfloor. She continues to learn and collect a patchwork of stories to teach and inspire others on their operational excellence journeys. In addition to her writing, consulting, and speaking engagements, Sarah is passionate about traveling the world and immersing herself in diverse cultures.