this book has to rank as one of the best I've ever read in the area of general business, management, production and so on so my heart is congratulations go out to its author Jeffrey K liker.

essentially the Toyota Way is nothing more than a brief review of several aspects of the history of the Toyota company. More specifically, however, liker he is mainly concerned with what he called the 14 management principles from the world's greatest Manufacturer. He does it very well. The biggest surprise to me is that the good thing is that that have come out of Toyota aren't just a phenomenon end of the last 20 years or so they have been coming out of Toyota for a century and more.

the first surprise came when I learned the founder of the company began as a manufacturer of looms as used in cloth weaving and not as a manufacturer of cast. It came as no surprise I suppose that the looms they developed were innovative, creative and world beaters... sound familiar?

Even then, more or less a century ago, the Toyota philosophy was strong: if things need to change, change them; if the technology doesn't exist to solve a problem, create it; and if the people are not available to do the jobs that need to be done, develop them. This sort of thing is clearly fundamental to the success of Toyota.

Even coming up to date and I am still surprised at how long Toyota has been getting it right. I have followed the Toyota story reasonably well over the years but still missed the fact that they had been doing what they been doing so well for so long. What are the 14 management principles, then?

14 management principles

1. Base your management decisions on a long term philosophy even at the expense of short-term financial goals
2. Create continuous process flow to bring problems of the service
3. Use pull systems to avoid overproduction
4. Level out the workload: heijunka
5. Build a culture of stopping to fix problems to get quality right first time
6. Standardised tasks are the foundation of continuous improvement and employee empowerment
7. Use visual control so no problems are hidden
8. Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes
9. Develop leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy and teach it to others
10. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy
11. Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them to improve
12. Go and see for yourself to understand thoroughly the situation: genchi genbutsu
13. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions and rapidly
14. Become a learning organisation through relentless reflection and continuous improvement: hansei and kaizen

Source: Liker The Toyota Way pages 37 to 40

I have marked, made notes and ticks and crosses all the way through this book: properly more than I've ever made on any other book. So much so that there is far too much to say about this book. The best I can do therefore is to give you a flavour of some aspects of some of the things in this book says.

one of the key things is that Liker talked about early in the book is the development of the Lexus. In this discussion we learn a lot about the Toyota philosophy of engineering and manufacturing. For example they talk about trade-offs and what they call achieving and no compromise objectives. The following table:

1 great high speed handling/stability	YET	a pleasant ride
2 fast and smooth ride	YET	low fuel consumption
3 super quiet	YET	light weight
4 elegant styling	YET	great aerodynamics
5 warm	YET	functional interior
6 great stability at high speed	YET	great coefficient of drag value (low friction)

The point of this table is that there were a lot of trade-offs, lots of choices to be made since it is a brand new car comprising many brand new concepts for the company. I think it says a huge amount about the company that they in the end got rid of all trade-offs by combining, for example, great high-speed handling/stability with a pleasant ride... not one or the other but both; similarly rather than reading about Lexus with a fast and smooth ride all low fuel consumption, we read about the Lexus having both.

You will also read about the organisation of production including the use of the U shaped one piece flow cell of production. this is also a fascination: again not necessarily new but then not everyone does it! What we see here on page 97 is a diagram of the organisation of a factory or a department which he is convoluted: that is, the flow of work through a an organisation that is more is haphazard or random. It works this way because it's made to work this way: Lathess, mills, grinders and drills are all set out in such a way that the production process is bound to be haphazard.

on the following page there is a diagram showing the U-shaped one piece of flow cell and in this setup there is a requirement for many fewer people and the flow of production is both tightly controlled and logical. This means that products that pass through this organisation may now pass through within minutes or even seconds rather than hours and sometimes even days. Not only is it the layout of facilities is important but also training and development of the employees since this is their multi skilled environment.

Toyota attitude to parents and rejection of work is also vital and fascinating. Even though the work of car manufacture can be tedious there is no reason why rejects and to quality should be allowed through the system. In the case of Toyota and we see that employees are gathered together in teams of five in six people and if someone has a particular problem that they can't solve then they stop the production and the rest of their team helps them to solve their problem. The outcome of this approach is that Toyota is working out almost zero defects. More than that Toyota doesn't even need to use techniques such as six sigma since they are automatically built in to the company philosophy and practice.

The balanced scorecard is something else that may strike you as you read through this book because it's not there. As far as I can tell and as far as I know, Toyota does not use the balanced scorecard in its factories: as with its non use of six sigma, I think the reason they don't use it is that they don't need to. The way the Toyota manages its operations is already very finely balanced.

Over pages 92 to 93 you will see an astonishingly is simple example of how Toyota can do things in three minutes where other organisations take 21 minutes. They show an example of putting together the base of a computer with a monitor: a very simple process and yet without this simple Toyota production philosophy, the first finished and tested computer doesn't come off the line by 21 minutes. By using the Toyota system the first computer is finished in three minutes. Elsewhere in the book you will see how Toyota can change over from the production of one model to another one within three minutes were other manufacturers take up to 12 hours to achieve the same thing. See how they do it.

Liker does stress and various points throughout the book that learning the Toyota system is not easy and it's not something that you can be an expert at purely as a result of having read a book. You should appreciate that even the original Toyota people themselves spent years perfecting their techniques as did the author of this book himself. Full immersion for an extended period of time seems to be the only way truly to appreciate the full Toyota production system.

What good can come of all this, however? Many years ago now I learnt a statistic and since I haven't gone back to the source from quite a while and maybe a little bit adrift but I don't think so. Someone in the USA went to the main motor manufacturers have asked a simple question: how long would it take you to make one of every possible combination of every model you currently produce? I'm just want to give to results:

• Toyota 2.5 days
• General Motors 2.5 billion years

Can you see the implications of these statistics? if they still apply; and I know to some extent they do, then General Motors, the company still suffering enormous problems, should do something along the lines of learning how to use the Toyota production system properly.

So much more to say but in fact it's far too much more to say so I'll leave it there with the highest recommendation that you must read this book if you are studying business from any point of view not only manufacturer. You will find the contents of the book useful whoever you are and whatever you are doing. It is also very well written and there are many examples to think about.

Duncan Williamson
1^st July 2007