Editing Toyota Production System (section)

==Origins==
Toyota has long been recognized as a leader in the automotive manufacturing and production industry.<ref>Brian Bremner, B. and C. Dawson (November 17, 2003). [https://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2003-11-16/can-anything-stop-toyota "Can Anything Stop Toyota?: An inside look at how it's reinventing the auto industry"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304080411/http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2003-11-16/can-anything-stop-toyota |date=2016-03-04 }}. ''Business Week.''</ref>

Toyota received their inspiration for the system, not from the American automotive industry (at that time the world's largest by far), but from visiting a supermarket.  The idea of just-in-time production was originated by [[Kiichiro Toyoda]], founder of Toyota.<ref name="Ohno1988">{{Citation
 | last = Ohno | first =  Taiichi
 |date=March 1988
 | title = Just-In-Time For Today and Tomorrow
 | isbn = 978-0-915299-20-1
 | publisher = Productivity Press
}}</ref> The question was how to implement the idea.  In reading descriptions of American supermarkets, Ohno saw the supermarket as the model for what he was trying to accomplish in the factory.  A customer in a supermarket takes the desired amount of goods off the shelf and purchases them.  The store restocks the shelf with enough new product to fill up the shelf space.  Similarly, a work-center that needed parts would go to a "store shelf" (the inventory storage point) for the particular part and "buy" (withdraw) the quantity it needed, and the "shelf" would be "restocked" by the work-center that produced the part, making only enough to replace the inventory that had been withdrawn.<ref name="Ohno1998" /><ref name="Magee2007">{{Citation
 | last = Magee
 | first = David
 | date = November 2007
 | title = How Toyota Became #1 - Leadership Lessons from the World's Greatest Car Company
 | isbn = 978-1-59184-179-1
 | publisher = Portfolio Hardcover
 | url = https://archive.org/details/howtoyotabecame100mage
 }}</ref>

While low inventory levels are a key outcome of the System, an important element of the philosophy behind its system is to work intelligently and eliminate waste so that only minimal inventory is needed.<ref name="Ohno1988" /> Many Western businesses, having observed Toyota's factories, set out to attack high inventory levels directly without understanding what made these reductions possible.<ref>{{cite book|title=What is this thing called Theory of Constraints and how should it be implemented?|first=Eliyahu M.|last=Goldratt|publisher=North River Press|year=1990|pages=31–32}}</ref> The act of imitating without understanding the underlying concept or motivation may have led to the failure of those projects.{{Citation needed| date = April 2012}}