Summary to Just-In-Time in Practice at Toyota ( Steven J. Spear )

The paper ‘Just-in-Time in practice at Toyota: Rules-in-Use for building self-diagnostic, adaptive work-systems’ by Steven Spear is a detailed analysis and review of the ‘Just-in-Time’ process implementation at Toyota factories worldwide.

The paper draws on observation from Toyota’s manufacturing units and sees them as applicable to general management practices where the principles can be used in the delegation, coordination and task execution.

The author introduces the ‘Just-in-Time’ process by providing references of earlier studies by Lawerence and Losch (1979), Nelson and Winter (1982), Haynes and Pisano (1994) and others which dealt with operations management and emphasized the improvement and development of processes through problem solving using information localized in terms of time, place, process, and person.

In Section 2, ‘Research Context’ provides the evolution of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and its superiority in lean manufacturing in its factories globally. Toyota’s Kyushu car plant was rated the best in the world while in North AmericaToyota’s Cambridge Ontario plant was first.

In reviewing the literature on Toyota’s operation based advantage, the author has contrasted the studies of Hop and Spearman (2000) and Deleesnyder et al. (1989) which contrasted tools such as kanban-card pull systems with ConWIP and the pull and push approaches for production. Similarly, the author quotes Adler and Cole (1993), Adler, Goloftas and Levine (1997) who did similar studies.

Spear discovered that in TPS-managed organizations, all work is executed as hypothesis testing experiments that contribute to accelerated generation and accumulation of individual and organizational learning about delegating, coordinating, and performing work done collaboratively.

Section 3, details the methodology used by the author where he gathered data by doing or observing work across functional specialties at several different organizational levels. The author’s involvement covered a variety of technical processes at different supply-chain stages and in different product-markets across