The Leaning Factories 272
also saw that the American factories hadn’t changed much
since the 1930s when they for the first time visited Ford
and General Motors. While the American companies could
produce large quantities, the Japanese companies had more
limited resources. So Toyota didn’t have any other choice
than to evolve Henry Ford’s mass production system if they
wanted to catch up with the Americans. This new produc-
tion system became known as the Toyota Manufacturing
System.^2
Toyota’s factories would now manufacture what they
needed at the moment. While visiting factories, they also
visited US supermarkets where they could see how a prod-
uct on a shelf was replaced just after a customer purchased
it. Toyota took the idea and adapted it to the factory
floor. By delivering the parts needed just-in-time, they
could minimize the storage requirements. They imple-
mentedkaizen, which is Japanese for continuous improve-
ments. The Toyota employees strove always to improve
their working methods.^2
All these new ideas can be summarized with the word
evolution. “His [Toyoda] amazing innovation was this: he
put in place mechanisms in his company that actively
encouraged evolution,” Martin Eberhard said. “This was
an incredibly bold and risky idea at the time. Toyota has
encouraged incremental improvement in every aspect of
its business – from the factory floor to vendor relationships
to labor relationships to general problem solving in every
corner of the company – and today’s Lean system is the
result of 50 years of encouraged evolution.”^367