The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production -- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry » (Reprint)

James P. Womack is the president and founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute (www.lean.org), a nonprofit education and research organization based in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Daniel T. Jones is the chairman and founder of the Lean Enterprise Academy (www.leanuk.org), a nonprofit education and research organization based in the UK.

When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in 1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Today Toyota is passing GM as the world's largest auto maker and is the most consistently successful global enterprise of the past fifty years. This management classic was the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system that is the basis for its enduring success.

Now reissued with a new Foreword and Afterword, Machine contrasts two fundamentally different business systems -- lean versus mass, two very different ways of thinking about how humans work together to create value. Based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken of any industry -- MIT's five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program -- this book describes the entire managerial system of lean production.

Nearly twenty years ago, Womack, Jones, and Roos provided a comprehensive description of the entire lean system. They exhaustively documented its advantages over the mass production model pioneered by General Motors and predicted that lean production would eventually triumph. Indeed, they argued that it would triumph not just in manufacturing but in every value-creating activity from health care to retail to distribution.

Today The Machine That Changed the World provides enduring and essential guidance to managers and leaders in every industry seeking to transform traditional enterprises into exemplars of lean success.

Library Journal

This provocative and highly readable book summarizes five years of research by the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) at MIT into the role of the autmobile industry in the world economy. The authors, all directors of the IMVP, recommend that Western automobile makers adopt the concept of lean production in all phases of automobile production. A thorough and persuasive explanation of the benefits of lean production, along with numerous examples, mainly from Japanese industry, support their recommendations. This important book offers informed insight into the auto industry; for all public and academic libraries.-- Joseph Barth, U.S. Military Acad. Lib., West Point, N.Y.

Contents

FOREWORD 2007. WHY TOYOTA WON: A TALE OF TWO BUSINESS SYSTEMS

BEFORE YOU BEGIN THIS BOOK

1 THE INDUSTRY OF INDUSTRIES IN TRANSITION

THE ORIGINS OF LEAN PRODUCTION

2 THE RISE AND FALL OF MASS PRODUCTION

3 THE RISE OF LEAN PRODUCTION

THE ELEMENTS OF LEAN PRODUCTION

4 RUNNING THE FACTORY

5 DESIGNING THE CAR

6 COORDINATING THE SUPPLY CHAIN

7 DEALING WITH CUSTOMERS

8 MANAGING THE LEAN ENTERPRISE

DIFFUSING LEAN PRODUCTION

9 CONFUSION ABOUT DIFFUSION

10 COMPLETING THE TRANSITION

EPILOGUE

AFTERWORD 2007. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT LEAN PRODUCTION SINCE 1990

NOTES

APPENDIXES

A INTERNATIONAL MOTOR VEHICLE PROGRAM SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS

B INTERNATIONAL MOTOR VEHICLE PROGRAM RESEARCH AFFILIATE TEAM

C IMVP PROGRAM AND FORUM PARTICIPANTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX