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The purpose of this paper is to disentangle and elaborate on the constitutive elements of the concept of path dependence (initial conditions and lock‐in) for a concerted and in‐depth application to the study of organizational change.

The approach takes the form of a combination of a longitudinal and a comparative case‐study, based on secondary literature.

External initial conditions acted less as “imprinting” forces than is suggested in the literature on the genesis of the Toyota production system (TPS); a firm‐specific philosophy in combination with a critical sequence of events mainly shaped and locked‐in TPS.

The empirical sources are limited to publications in English, so relevant factors explaining the path taken may not all have been included. The importance of a salient meta‐routine might be firm‐specific.

The study contributes to understanding the factors underlying corporate performance by a critical re‐examination of a much heralded production system (TPS).

The paper highlights the use of the concept of meta‐routines to connect the core elements of path dependence, that is, sensitivity to initial conditions and lock‐in mechanisms.

Few companies have had the success that Toyota Motor Corporation has experienced over the past 70 years. Many give credit for Toyota's success to the company's famous Toyota Production System. Companies outside of Toyota have tried to implement versions of Toyota's system as Lean production; however, few companies have experienced the success of Toyota, and none have experienced Toyota's sustained success. In 2001, Toyota released a publication entitled The Toyota Way 2001 as a set of globalized standards of the culture that drives the success of the Toyota Production System.

This research examines the effect of the Toyota Way on the implementation of Lean production outside of Toyota. A survey was developed and a study was performed on a sample of 349 participants with Lean experience. Structural equation modeling was used to test the relationship between the Toyota Way culture, Lean production, and achieving the desired Lean production system results.

The results of this research discovered that the existence of the Toyota Way culture has a significant and positive mediating effect on a Lean production system achieving the desired Lean results.

This research created a validated survey instrument that can be used to evaluate and understand the status of a Lean implementation initiative based upon employee perception. The results of this study support assertions made by Lean practitioners and previous research stating that culture affects the level of success of Lean production system implementation. While this may not seem like breaking news, prior to this study no statistically validated research supporting such an assertion could be found. Furthermore, this research defines culture very specifically as the Toyota Way culture as outlined in The Toyota Way 2001.

The purpose of this paper is to compare principles from the original Toyota Production System (TPS), the Toyota Way 2001 and Kaizen philosophy with principles derived from Japanese Zen Buddhism. The paper would also like to enlarge the debate concerning some lessons learnt from Japanese culture in order to avoid Lean implementation failures.

The original English version of Taiichi Ohno’s book dedicated to the TPS, the Toyota Way 2001 and other relevant papers regarding Kaizen were reviewed and analyzed. The principles that emerged from the review of this literature were then compared with similar philosophical principles from Japanese Soto Zen Buddhism. The literature concerning Zen philosophy was methodically analyzed and categorized using the content analysis.

The results of this research show many theoretical parallelisms as well as lessons for practitioners, in particular referring to principles such as Jidoka, just-in-time, waste identification and elimination, challenge, Kaizen, Genchi Genbutsu, respect for people and teamwork.

Analysis and results are mainly based on the literature that was found, reviewed and categorized, along with the knowledge of authors on Zen philosophy. Results could differ depending on the literature reviewed and categorized.

The results of this research bring food for thought to practitioners in terms of lessons learnt from Japanese culture, Toyota principles and management style in order to avoid Lean implementation failures.

This is one of the first papers which compares Lean-TPS and Kaizen principles with the Zen philosophy to try to learn lessons for succeeding in Lean implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Toyota's management directed kaizen activities named Jishuken. Currently, there are many variations in understanding how Toyota develops its managers to support daily kaizen, especially when Toyota managers have different levels of understanding of Toyota production system (TPS) and skills essential in applying TPS.

This paper will study Toyota's Jishuken process in the context of strengthening TPS and analyze both the technical and management aspects of Toyota's Jishuken process.

When integrated into plant‐wide long‐term continuous improvement, Jishukens can be extremely effective at developing management's ability to conduct and to teach others to conduct daily kaizen and problem solving. This paper shows how Jishukens function within the TPS system to continuously improve managers' understanding of TPS both for their own concrete problem solving and to support manager's roles in communicating, coaching and teaching problem solving to production workers.

Most attempts to imitate Toyota fail because techniques are adopted piecemeal with little understanding of why they exist or what kind of organizational culture is needed to keep them alive. Jishuken serves as an example of a technique which is successful only when embedded within the right organizational culture.

The purpose of this study is to introduce an enterprise's productivity management named “Production efficiency improvement - PEFF”. This study shows the way of developing the management system to keep their shop floor “flexible to change” and “continuously controlling and improving” from the different levels and in various factories.

This study refers to Toyota's PEFF management system in the context of productivity enhancement through detailed management processes including yearly management, monthly management, daily management and its application in a case study from another sector as a model case of PEFF expansion. The methodology of this study is to introduce a method for production efficiency analysis, measure and select standard time through PEFF calculation.

Toyota's PEFF management can be extremely effective at developing management's ability to conduct day-to-day shop-floor management, know-how sharing and how Toyota applies PEFF to develop the world-standard on manpower efficiency for their factories. Besides, this study shows the applicable of PEFF improvement has successfully conducted in other manufacturers in a flexible way to achieve the improvement targets.

The results of this study will aid the managers in production lines to find the method of calculating and evaluating production efficiency through Toyota's management techniques such as PEFF, YIP, WVACT and standard time. However, the approach for this paper was from a synchronized system as Toyota is limited to generalized to small and medium-sized enterprises.

This paper is introducing the original Toyota's management technique to sustainable enhance their manpower performance and efficiency and answer the question of why TPS still exists in the age of digital management. PEFF management serves as an example of a value management process to help manufacturers to set guidelines to improve their productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the manifold linkages connecting the Toyota Production System (TPS) back to the Gilbreths and others, and to determine how these have contributed to enterprise‐wide best practice. Industrial engineering (IE) theory rapidly subsumed method study and thereby made considerable contributions to output in World War II (WWII). The outcome is the positing of “contemporary” IE.

Consideration is given to the Japanese Management Association (JMA) personal handshake route originated by Frank Gilbreth in which experiences were handed down in lecture note format by successive generations of industrial engineers. His interaction with the FW Taylor Scientific Management movement is a second theme. The internationally recognised “softer” approach to teaching and coaching due to Lillian Gilbreth is then discussed. Finally the Gilbreth MOI2 Process Chart is examined.

TPS has evolved over an extended period of time to achieve continuous material flow. There has been no single procedure or technical breakthrough. Much of the detail would have been familiar to the Gilbreths. These became evident in the USA and the UK auto industries soon after the First World War. Elements of JIT are recognisable even earlier in the building of the UK Crystal Palace in 1851. However the scenario of the current TPS enterprise would be new to the Gilbreths. Similarly the various ways in which the systems approach has been successfully implemented throughout the organisation would appear strange. This becomes self‐evident via a three‐axis model representation of contemporary industrial engineering.

Newly appointed Toyota executives pursuing the shopfloor based Acclimatisation Course would immediately recognise the method study based waste elimination techniques at work. As Ohno remarked, such removal merely levels the playing field. Knowledge (and above all practice) in their use should be a pre‐requisite skill for employees at all levels. This is a sometimes “hidden” secret of TPS, but dates back to Lillian Gilbreth in 1914.

The paper supports the view that effective product delivery is best driven via sound industrial engineering expertise operating within an active learning organisation. The four level prism model applied to TPS highlights its system attributes.

The paper confirms there is a continuing role for well established method study techniques to be adapted to face new challenges, and output as “contemporary” industrial engineering.

Toyota's management system, more formally known as the Toyota production system (TPS) is one of the most benchmarked business improvement strategies in modern industry. While many companies try to emulate Toyota's success using a variety of different approaches, most practitioners are not aware how Toyota replicates TPS at suppliers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the in‐house capabilities that are transferred from Toyota to suppliers as a way to more deeply understand how TPS can evolve.

This work studies Toyota's supplier development practices by evaluating organizational documents using latent semantic analysis (LSA). LSA is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual‐usage and meaning of words and phrases by statistical computation applied to text. LSA is based on singular value decomposition (SVD), which is a mathematical matrix decomposition technique using factor analysis.

This work shows that Toyota targets processes, rather than whole systems, in assisting suppliers to be more effective at abnormality management. Findings also show that Toyota's approval process doesn't necessarily support major kaizen at suppliers yet does encourage minor day‐to‐day kaizen. Finally, this work reports that the Toyota Way for suppliers does not have to be adopted by suppliers, but does represent “A Way” to interact with suppliers to drive both culture and productivity simultaneously.

The paper uses a new method for analyzing Toyota's supplier development practices by mathematically representing and analyzing Toyota's organizational documents. This new method allows various components and features of Toyota's supplier development process to be represented and described in a way that offers many unique insights.

Manufacturing, Western management theories and Japanese management practices.

This case can be used in project management or management-related courses at tertiary institutions at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level.

This case provides students with an opportunity to find out what make Toyota so successful in manufacturing through its famous production system as well as the underlying Toyota Way principles. All students are expected to understand the Toyota Way model with a balanced view that goes beyond a set of lean tools such as just-in-time. This case opens a historical account for the Toyota Way model by connecting with possible Western management theories and Japanese management practices.

It is expected to significantly benefit students with industry experience with the intention of initiating appropriate changes in their own industry and/or organization by applying what they have learnt from the Toyota Way, through bridging with Western management theories.

Teaching notes.

This paper aims to explore the lean production paradigm as promoter of workers' creativity and thinking potential, and recognize this human potential as a fundamental asset for companies' growth and success, being a major factor to face the disturbing and unpredictable needs of current markets, providing companies with the necessary agility. The authors believe these thinkers are the base for an agile company and learning organization.

The objectives were achieved through a deep literature review, starting with the Toyota production system (TPS) origins. Some industrial lean case studies were also explored to show that the adoption of a lean culture promotes a pro‐active attitude and behavior that are so important for companies nowadays.

This paper explores the association between lean production and the promotion of thinkers. For a long period, and even nowadays, it is common to consider the worker as just another production factor that the companies explore to obtain the maximum utilization. This was a result from the distorted knowledge of the Taylor principles and the Ford assembly line model, seeing the worker as a gear in the “big machine”. Lean production was seen, for many years and by many authors, as an extension of this Taylorist/Fordist model but this paper highlights lean production as a work organization model where the worker assumes a position of thinker, continuously looking for improvement and continuously looking for wastes. By reducing wastes, the company will be prepared to accommodate changes and will attain agility.

This paper is mainly based on literature review and on some industrial case studies of lean implementations (recent or just a few years ago); a deep research is necessary on the cause‐effect relation between lean production adoption and promotion of thinkers.

Helping companies to recognize the importance of workers as thinkers will have relevant impacts through the reduction of waste and costs, improving quality and increase productivity and revenue. Also, for workers, this recognition means respect, self‐esteem and confidence, and, essentially, more satisfaction with work.

With lean production and agility, better products will quickly reach society, contributing thus to clients' satisfaction. Also, lean companies' CEO and workers looking for wastes will lead to a reduction of energy consumption, raw materials needs and gas emissions (reducing pollution of air, land and water), producing only what is needed. Being satisfied with their work they will be happier contributing to the raising of the country's happiness.

The authors are not aware of similar research. The paper is meant for those who are interested in improving their companies' operations and workers' relationships.

The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how Toyota deploys Lean Manufacturing and Toyota Production System (TPS) for their automotive parts’ suppliers in Philippines based on the case study and the literature review.

The methods to better understand how Toyota donates Lean Manufacturing to develop their suppliers include to review the general Lean thinking process and tools and study in depth the selected Lean manufacturing tools that are directly related with Toyota supplier development and to show the actual implementations base in the case of the supplier of Toyota in Philippines.

The result of the case study shows how Toyota donates their Lean manufacturing (TPS) methods to the suppliers. There are several procedures and various tools for the Lean process. But one procedure within the process and only some of the Lean tools are suitable for supplier development. The case shows that all improvements (Kaizen) during the Lean implementation should be directly intertwined onsite (Genba) and just a small amount of the Lean tools is needed in real-world situations. In other words, the consultation of the Lean implementation might not require the full package of the Lean implementations. More importantly, the consultations of the Lean implementation without deeply understanding the onsite are useless.

The project for the Lean deployment for supplier implementation is targeted to understand the full procedure from the start to the end, but the case in this paper is only covering the setup phase. As the suppliers of Toyota, there are additional parts to be implemented (i.e. shipping management), but it is not covered in this paper.

There are some researches about Lean implementation framework, and only few cases deal with the actual Lean implementations. But the case about the Lean implementation of supplier development initiation which aligned with the Toyota Company is unique.