Implementing process innovation - The case of the Toyota production system

Abstract

For more than twenty years now, the Toyota production system has been the subject of lively interest and debate in the West. Particularly the 1980s and early 1990s saw a real boom in the publication of scientific writings and works of popular science which tried to get to discover the secret of Toyota success. One of the best known papers is the study carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers Womack, Jones and Ross in 1990, which intrigued whole legions of production scientists, management researchers and industry practitioners and had a key impact on subsequent research and on the Western view of the Toyota production system and also on the self-image of Japanese production management itself. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006 Printed in Germany.