Zeitschrift für Ergonomie
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Abstrakt

An Unified Model of the Toyota Production System with Total Quality Management and People Factors

Ching-Chow Yang

In the 1950s, Japanese economy collapsed, as a result, the company’s funds were scarce and financing was very difficult. The Japanese auto market was dominated by western cars, and local cars owned very low market share, due to the local cars were of poor quality with high costs. In order to improvement the quality and reduce the costs, Toyota developed and adopted several special practices such as waste elimination, production leveling, pull system, kanban system, automatic detection and stop, etc.. These practices are gradually integrated as Toyota Production System (TPS). These practices and the used tools constitute the ‘hard side’ of TPS. In order to successfully implement the specific production system, Toyota specially emphases on the ‘soft side’ of TPS including respect for people, realization of quality awareness, continuous improvement, empowerment, based on the implementation of Company-Wide Quality Control (CWQC).