Slave to the Rhythm: Adopt Time-Oriented Work Systems. Now (#24)

When, in the 1940s, production engineer Taiichi Ohno set out to reshape Toyota’s production into to what is now commonly referred to as TPS or Lean Manufacturing, he did not start off with the now-famous single-piece-flow. Instead, he and his peers had to discover how to break large production batches down to ever-smaller batches, by reducing changeover times, testing different takes on shop floor arrangement, and reorganizing the work processes. It took Ohno-San (as he was referred to within Toyota), his teams and sites a full three decades to arrive at single-piece flow (or: batches of one) and to integrate most of their process steps into the kanban, including much of their suppliers’ processes.

Today, it is hard to imagine a consistent, company-wide transformation effort to proceed over a 30-year time-span – unwaveringly and largely uninterrupted, from process to process, from site to site, from country to country. Who would have that kind of patience? Who would endure long enough to carry such a marathon through? Fortunately, there is no need for us to answer these questions: We are free to stand on the shoulders of practitioner-giants like Ohno and John Shook at Toyota, and mindful articulators like Daniel Jones and James Womack, or Jeffrey Liker. To achieve rhythm and flow in industrial companies fast, we have Deming and BetaCodex theory at our disposal, and a bunch of BetaCodex social technologies.

Crucially, outstanding practitioners and inventors Ernst Weichselbaum, Ian Glenday and Rajan Suri idealized a trio of Time-Oriented Work Systems approaches in the 1980s and 1990s that allow companies to escape lean agony and the tools for toolheads trap. In this paper, we will talk about the Big Three Time-Oriented Work Systems approaches and their potential for industry and manufacturing companies of all kinds.