Toyota Production System (TPS)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System

Check out a book titled:

Lean Thinking

By: James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones

It is about lean manufacturing mainly from a Toyota perspective.
This will be the best guide for you.

Also google the following Toyota terms:

1.) Muda

2.) Taiichi Ohno

Good Luck,

Lisa

Further to references given so far, by other contributors to this particular question, you may find the book titled 'The Toyota Way' by Jeffrey K. Liker useful. there may be more such references to look at but this one covers various aspects of 'The Toyota Way' well.

"Tips methods to follow"

"Danger will robinson"

If you are a high variety low volume company (HVLV), you can get twisted up slavishly following the gospel of toyota in their low variety high volume(LVHV) systems. There are several things to consider if you are a smaller enterprise.

TPS is optimized for a single product family with minor variations within; The HVLV shop mus handle much more complicated material flows due to the 10^x additional inputs and process routings each week. This makes scheduling easy and a function of takt time for a TPS shop. This is not achievable in a job shop setting unless the shop is composed solely of independent workcells.

TPS is optimized for larger enterprizes LVHV that have a cadre of full time specialists to implement and nurture this system. HVLV companies are held by their customers to draconian margins, making such human resources an unaffordable luxury. SO expense of consultants, training, and other needed technical resources become an expense overlay.

TPS expects all products to follow essentially the same routing (per family); the HVLV systems must accomodate 10^x^x number of different routings

TPS relies on a stable and sufficient demand from its single market; HVLV has no such economic certainties and so demand volume fluctuation is a considerably more treacherous variable to consider. This makes pull systems a breeze from the TPS point of view. The inherent lack of / nonexistence of / reliable/stable demand forecasts and repetition of orders in a job shop environment make job shop scheduling priorities slaves to customer due dates and dollars rather than strict function of capacity capability constraints or common sense.

TPS works because they can design the variation out. HVLV shops actually enable this for the TPS customers of the world, be cause we are the ones to whom this variability has been pushed upon.

TPS- well, you get the point. If you are working for a big company, TPS is the gospel.

If you are working in a Supply chain of a big company, TPS can trip you up.

Try looking up "job shop lean."

Sometimes whats good for the goose ain't so good for the gander.

milo "Elimination of waste and continuous improvement are the real payload in TPS for ALL enterprises"

In a nutshell, Toyota Production System (TPS) is to breakdown your production into other sub-production, and each sub-production look at one another as supplier and customer. For example, let say your product is candy. And the way you make your candy consist of putting the materials (sugar, flours, etc.) together, mix it, cook it, mode it, and package it.

Your TPS would then be raw materials (supplier) to mixer (customer), and the mixer is the supplier for the cook (customer), and so on and so on until the whole product (candy) is shipped out the door.

By having each process look at each other process as supplier and customer, you can track which one of your process you need to focus on and to eliminate waste.

MidniteFighter

This is no nutshell of TPS. This is that which stinketh and causeth the flowers to grow.

milo