Lessons learned from TOYOTA

There are several practices that Toyota adopted in Kentucky unit to achieve success such as teamwork, community of fate, job rotation, plant layout, group orientation, and work structure. There are also some practices that they had modified such as promotion based on seniority, lifetime employment, and company unions to fit local needs.
What is most dominant in their organization is the teamwork based on social-technical system (STS) which asserts that everything is dependent on everything else, and they support this strategy in every aspect of their organization. For instance, they developed three layers of teams in their organization. There are working teams that consist of members responsible in production and maintenance, company teams that including all employees of the local operation, and corporate teams comprised by all members of Toyota. In addition, this strategy is obvious in their bonus system in which they give the same reward to all members of a work team based on their outputs to improve spirits of teams.
Another important factor that helps Toyota to achieve this level of success is that they design their organization structure so that they provide an environment of open communication for the staffs. Using a flat structure accompanied by close friendship organizational atmosphere let Toyota's employees to share their knowledge and experience and take them to action in order to increase performance of the whole organization. Good relation between management and employees which is the result of the cited structure together with the omission of private offices, shows its outcome in the relationship ofemployees and customers. In this way they gain a great extent of customer satisfaction that leads to more market share and benefit.
Moreover, their production system and the reliance of Toyota on their employees result in omitting direct supervision and instead concentrating on methods such as processed standardization since they have special tasks for accomplishing every job. And they use output standardization to ensure the quality of their product before it releases. Also using skill standardization provides enough skills for staffs to become familiar with all the production system and special tasks.
One vital element in this company that guarantees their success by going through TPS is that they choose the right people during a long selection process. Since their culture is different from U.S companies they should choose among inexperienced well-educated candidates who may be adaptable with their unique practices. In addition, eliminating physical tasks by automation and using multi-task workforce in order to enrich jobs result in job satisfaction among people. Consequently, Toyota takes advantage of employees' commitment because of their motivations and satisfaction helps it to have a strong team of staffs who believe in the fact that their benefit tight with organization benefits.
Moreover, Toyota uses a decentralized decision making system and give chance to all employees to participate in the process of making decision. This factor strengthens the spirit of teamwork in their organization due to great sense of ownership and membership relative to organization. Also this makes the process of implementing determined decision as quick as possible since all the implementers have a sense of responsibility to complete the decision they have made.
Last but not the least is the style of leadership in Toyota. In fact, this firm's managers use a participative, social-motional style of leadership. They encourage their subordinate to participate in decision making process and are concerned with their welfare and relations. By following this style, indeed, they support teamwork strategy of Toyota.
All the above facts help Toyota to establish TPS with its principals such as JIT, Kanban, Jidoka, and Kaizen in its Unit in Kentucky successfully. A powerful production system accompanied by strong employee commitment that is a result of their structure, hiring system, and their attention to welfare of staffs provide a high performance system for Toyota as a manufacturing company.

Lead Users

Who are Lead Users?

As described by Eric von Hippel from MIT Sloan School of Management, “lead users have two characteristics; first, they have high incentives to solve a problem (their needs) and second, they are the head of the target market and so what they want in the present will be a demand of the market as a whole in the future (as shown in the figure)”. For example, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, needed hypertext and network computers for its own work and that’s why he developed it and now WWW as a result was invented to fulfill the market need as a whole.

Why lead users are important?

Many well known innovative firms are using lead users' innovations as a source for solving challenges in producing new products and services. For example, 3M as one of the greatest innovator firms use them in a method, named Lead User Research Method, to save its declining medical department with new ideas for production. They actually did a great effort to find relative lead users from completely various fields and gather their experiences and innovations in dealing with problems relative to their main challenges in producing new product.
Lead User research method is actually a systematic way for innovation while it keeps enough flexibility for growing innovation. It has four major phases that lead firms to extract market needs and innovative ways of dealing with them in order to develop innovation solutions for meeting that needs. These phases are:
1- Project Planning (takes 4 to 6 weeks)
2- Trends/Needs Identification (takes 5 to 6 weeks)
3- Preliminary Concept Generation (takes 5 to 6 weeks)
4- Final Concept Generation (takes 5 to 6 weeks)