Chapter 3

Production Management

Japanese firms are world leaders in cost-efficient and quality-oriented manufacturing. Next to kaizen, Japanese production management techniques have had the greatest influence on Western firms and their business processes. Japanese firms have managed to make products for almost half the price of those of their Western competitors and have reduced the product defect rate to almost zero.

The leading firm in this field is Toyota, which is responsible for many groundbreaking techniques such as just-in-time management (or lean management), the so-called kanban system, and other successful concepts such as jidôka and heijunka. The overall goals of these techniques are to reduce any kind of waste and to improve the ...

Get Understanding Japanese Management Practices now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.