Conditions for survival in the manufacturing industry in VUCA era
Satoru Murakami
CEO Goal-System consultants Inc.,
What is a giant's shoulder? -Following the history of manufacturing(4) Environment assumed by TOC
Last time, I introduced the establishment of TPS (Toyota Production System) built by Taiichi Ohno and others. This time, it's finally time for TOC, Dr. Goldratt.
In the 1980s, large quantities of high-quality automobiles began to be exported from Japan to the United States. To learn the "secret", Dr. James Womack of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and others continued their research, and finally, named Toyota's manufacturing a slim production method as "lean manufacturing method". Then, he published his book, "Lean Manufacturing Changes the World's Automotive Industry" (1990), and introduced TPS to the United States.
Dr. James Womack, who was studying industrial policy at MIT, is studying Toyota's operations, and what really determines the competitiveness of a company is operation management (management) of how to organize and operate manufacturing that he intuitively felt that it was a technology. After that, he became responsible for the benchmarking project of the global automobile industry centered on MIT, and the above-mentioned book was a summary of the research results. In this book, detailed quantitative data proved that Japanese automobile manufacturers are superior to Western automobile manufacturers in all aspects such as quality, productivity, and lead time. And it was calmly analyzed that the overwhelming difference in productivity was not the cultural climate of Japan, but the "lean manufacturing method".
If the lean manufacturing method is introduced successfully, efficient production can be achieved without waste. Therefore, from the latter half of the 1980s to the 1990s, American companies set the slogan "Learn from Japan" and worked diligently on how to introduce this lean production in-house. This is the "first TPS boom" in the United States, and from this point on, lean production will begin to spread in the United States in earnest.
However, just-in-time is not a method that can be applied to all companies, and it was not an effective method that products with short life cycles, large seasonal fluctuations, complicated distribution routes, large price fluctuations, custom-made manufacturing styles with few repetitive tasks, and equipment that performs most of the processes in-equipment.
In the production environment after the establishment of TOC in the 1980s and 1990s, the product life cycle has become shorter and customer needs have diversified, and in order to respond to this, it has been required to produce an extremely large number of varieties in a short period of time. As a result, various fluctuations and uncertain events occur, causing various imbalances and constantly causing bottlenecks, which hinders stable operation of the production line.
In order to deal with this, TOC assumed a state in which the process capability assumed by TPS was not balanced. In an unbalanced environment caused by fluctuations in demand, the productivity (capacity) of the entire factory is constrained by the bottleneck process, which has the relatively lowest capacity. This is a "natural" fact if you think about it, and the TOC started from focusing on this point.
Therefore, the "Constraint" is a "bottleneck process" in the factory, and it is a "key factor" that hinders the achievement of the goal of the organization from the perspective of the entire company. "Learn from Japan", in such a situation, Israeli physicist Eliyahu M Goldratt (1948-2011) insisted on a seemingly strange theory called TOC (Theory Of Constraints). If lean manufacturing was the secret weapon of the Japanese manufacturing industry, the TOC method could be said to be the secret weapon for the American manufacturing industry to catch up with Japanese companies.
The beginning of TOC was in the latter half of the 1970s. A friend of mine who ran a factory brought a production schedule problem to a doctor who was studying physics in Israel. He has developed a different production scheduling method by incorporating some original ideas into this problem.
Since then, Dr. Goldratt has been keenly interested in production issues and has taken this approach further to develop breakthrough production scheduling software algorithms. He set up a company in the United States to sell the software, and he himself became chairman. The software was named OPT (Optimized Production Technology) and drew public attention.
The OPT algorithm was never disclosed because of trade secrets, so the OPT was wrapped in a mysterious veil. However, the introduction users reported that the sales of the factory increased and the work in progress decreased significantly even though they did not make any capital investment, and OPT sold well to major companies mainly in the automobile industry.
In addition, he thinks of publishing the idea behind him in the form of a novel, and publishes a novel called "The Goal". The best-selling novel will produce unexpected effects. Some readers responded that even if they did not introduce OPT, they had a great effect when they made improvements according to this novel.
Therefore, it is far more successful to open up the world of manufacturing operation management (management technology) as depicted in "The Goal" and expand it to the activity of continuous improvement (Process of On Going Improvement). He named it TOC and it became popular.
After that, he published many business novels such as "It's Not Luck" and "Critical Chain" following "The Goal", and proposed a project management method (CCPM) called critical chain and an unrefusable offer (URO). he had created new theories in business one after another.
TOC theory was an evolved version of the idea that was born by studying the principle of "flow" that Mr. Ohno and others had built up.
