Fixing Toyota: Quality Is Hard-Lean Is Much Harder

A closer look at Toyota's quality and lean manufacturing problems--and the powerful lessons and warnings they represent. In the general and business press, Toyota's quality issues are just that: quality issues. The industrial community wonders if there might be more to it: whether Toyota's namesake production system (TPS), also called lean manufacturing or just-in-time production (JIT), has been sullied. To see why this is a concern, consider the primary objective of the Toyota system/lean/JIT....