Toyota and the JIT philosophy

Toyota Production System and the JIT Philosophy
Toyota Production System
The Toyota Production System (TPS) strives to achieve the objectives of delivering products of a quality, price, and within a timeframe defined by the customer. The TPS has been built on the pillars of Just-in-time (JIT) and Jidoka (Autonomation), which are based on the foundations of Heijunka (production smoothing), see Figure 1. The TPS as it is known today has been developed from the post WWII Japanese recovery. This paper intends to explore the JIT element of the TPS, discussing its advantages and disadvantages. The concept of Kanban will also be discussed in relation to JIT.

Figure 1. TPS, as defined by Toyota, source: Harriman F. (2003)

For brevity, only a brief explanation of Jidoka and Heijunka will be given.
Jidoka
Jidoka is the concept of adding an element of human judgement to automated equipment. By doing this, the equipment becomes capable of determining acceptable quality and essentially ...