The Evolution of Production Systems

Abstract

This paper analyzes the formation process of production systems in order to identify the sources of Toyota's competitive strength (i.e., its long-term high-level performance). While previous studies have analyzed either the functions of the Toyota-style manufacturing system or the history of that system, there have been few research efforts that have integrated the two. The present paper explores both the functions and origins of the Toyota-style manufacturing system simultaneously. It also concludes that the source of Toyota's competitive strength can be explained in part by the “product architecture" perspective. The paper also shows that manufacturing contains three layers of organizational capability: manufacturing (monozukuri) capability, improvement (kaizen) capability, and evolutionary capability.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.