Customer Reviews

The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production

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I read this book while working for a major software firm--it was fascinating to me that Toyota could update their automobiles faster than we could bring out a new operating system.

This study of the world automotive industry by a group of MIT academics reaches the radical conclusion that the much vaunted Mercedes technicians are actually a throwback to the pre-industrial age, while Toyota is far ahead in costs and quality by building the automobiles correctly the first time. The lesson that it cost more to fix it than to build it correctly should be applicable to a lot of industries--not just manufacturing. The description of the marketing information system that Toyota uses was very enlightening. They involve the entire company in generating marketing feedback. Even dealer sales staff spend time working on the new product teams. Trust me, very few high-tech firms methodically collect feedback from their customers, and none have a system this comprehensive.

This is not just a book about lean production--this is guidance in understanding how your business operates and delivering good products that your customers want.

If you are just starting out learning about Lean Manufacturing, and you only have time to read one book, "The Machine that Changed the World" is an historically important book but "Lean Thinking" is the one that actually gets you started toward implementation. It's one of those rare occasions where the sequel was better than the original.

The title sets the tone the authors carry throughout the book. A little too much glorifying. A little too much hype. Yes, what Toyota and others did was impressive. But no, they did not change the world. In my opinion, not even close.

And this book is dated. In fact, though written in the early '90s, it reads more like many of the books written about Japanese management in the early '80s. Books like "Japan As Number One." Or "Trading Places." At the time, the Japanese were thought to be able to do no wrong.

Now, of course, we know that Japanese executives and managers are mere mortals too. Toyota has certainly done better than most Japanese companies over the last 15 years. And part of the reason -- a big part probably -- has been the effectiveness of their management in areas like lean production. But even without the benefit of the hindsight we now have, the authors of this book should have realized that their unstinted praise was not warranted. Even for the brains behind Toyota.

Still, this book is the best I have found on the history of the "Industry of Industries." It traces the history of the automobile industry from craft production to mass production to lean production. No other book I have read has done that so well.

And for an academic book, The Machine That Changed the World is easy to read. It keeps a careful balance between informing the reader and keeping the reader's interest. Most writers, particularly of works like this, tilt too much one way or the other. Either too dry and pedantic or too light and entertaining. A happy medium is hard to achieve.

Where does the auto industry go from here? Lean production is no longer exceptional. It has become the rule. But it seems to have run its course.

The future of the automobile industry may lie in "collaborative production." Major automakers concentrate on sales and service, not production. Suppliers develop specialized skills in technologies from hybrid power trains to drive-by-wire control systems. And everyone sells to everyone else. Technology becomes less important than brand.

If that is the case, Toyota may still lead the pack. In Business Week's list of the top 100 global brands, Toyota leads all carmakers at number 7. No one has caught Toyota napping on the increasing importance of brand.

Even so, Toyota fiercely defends the idea that is a motor company, not a sales company. Innovative technology and excellent manufacturing have been much more of a focus than sales. Will it be able to adapt if the industry does change?

An interesting question that we should see answered in the next few years. Like many good history books, The Machine That Changed the World gives us hints as to what that future will be.

This book introduces quite a few concepts, but unfortunately all of the examples are from the auto industry. If the reader can overcome this, and think of how the information would apply to their own industry, the book is of great value. The author's view of the future of the auto industry is quite interesting. I personally believe most cars will be bought over the Net as people generally hate dealing with car dealerships.

Good book, but if you're truly interested in this subject read Lean Thinking instead (same authors, better examples although many are also auto industry based).

This is the first book that I planned to read as a part of learning about lean, the other two books are "Lean thinking" and "Becoming Lean" , so far I could say that the "Machine that Changed the World" is a good benchmarking between craft, mass and lean producers. It mainly gives you an insight of the differences between lean and mass producers from the production, sales, marketing, customer relation and other dimensions. If you don't know about lean I really recommend you to start by reading his book because it will make you start to think in a lean way, if you know about lean and convinced about what it can do to you organization start with lean thinking and then go to "Becoming Lean".
This book is aimed at strategic level and as a key tool to convince old timers about the lean-mentality against the push-mentality.

This book is certainly a kind of milestone in the auto literature history. Yet, for today's readers it is probably not the first choice to read. The huge impact the book had and its benefit is that it rightly lifts the Toyota production system (TSP) to the status of the Ford assembly line and other revolutionary inventions in production organisation. It declares TSP as the successor of Fordian mass production.

There were books about the TPS before, notably the book of Taiichi Ohno in the mid-1980s, one of the principal creators of TSP, but the audience was not sure about its real significance. TSP came a long way from the 1950s and its development was evolutionary rather than instantaneous. Its deployment was painstaking and required a lot of Japanese perseverance. The Japanese deserve all the credit for pulling that through. With this book the MIT plays a kind of authority in the history of production technology and bestows TSP official recognition. For today, the book is still interesting to read from a historical perspective but if you want to get into the details of the history of TSP Fujiomoto's "Evolution of a Manufacturing System' is probably the best choice today.

The problem with "the machine that changed the world" (besides its title) is that is to one-side and totally uncritical of the Japanese manufacturers. This was probably necessary to ring the alarm bells at the time but it was not justified. The decade following the publicaton of the book would show that the Toyota system involved certain risks and idiosyncracies of the Japanese market context. (It is interesting to note that only Cusamano, who worked on the product development part of the MIT project without being an author of the book, acknowledges the high risk of escalating design costs that would later push Nissan to the verge of bankruptcy). For Madzda and Mitsubishi TPS was very problematic as well. While the authors are totally concentrating on production systems, which is ok, it is not the single success factor in auto industry as the authors implicitly suggest. They almost treat cars as a commodity, exchangeable, only attributed by quality and certain design criteria. The ranking the book presents is based on production efficiency (first, Japanese, second come US firms, and the Europeans are the worst of the worst). Yet, it makes it very difficult to understand the sustained success of the French and German car industry. Admittingly, the UK industry went downhill, but at the same time Spain became one of the biggest auto production location in the world. What the authors (professors of production technology) neglect is that the European market and the Japanese market are very different from the US market.
First, local markets have very different preferences. Auto companies in Europe, Japan and the US have a strong home market advantages by perceiving and responding to these home preferences much earlier. Second, local requirements are very different as Porter notices in his book about the competitive advantage of nations. For instance, German autobahns require top performance, high fuel prices in Europe make European cars more fuel efficent and so on. The real success of the Japanese in the US came when they started to develop cars solely for the US market needs which were then manufactured with the quality the TSP system achieves.
As a result of the Japanese focus on the US market, they were never really successful in Europe, where performance, innovative technology and design ranks somehow relatively higher than in Japan and the US.

Yet, Toyota's sustained global success indicates that they have created a marvellous production system that is worth studying. But it is not very easy to understand in all its parts, that is has not been until today fully adopted by companies outside Japan demonstrate its complexity or dependence on the Japanese market context

The Machine That Changed the World; The Story of Lean Production
A great book that although becoming a little outdated portrays the ongoing trends in the automobile production industry in three major cultural areas.
The three areas are;the Asian lean production (Toyota) v.s. the American system,(mass production) v.s. the European craftsman system. On a larger scale it will and is affecting manufacturing everywhere.
Henry Ford was the founder of the American mass production system, and Ford was very successful adopting it to the aircraft and steel industries. American companies adopted this system and it is one of the main reasons for American pre-eminence in many industries worldwide. Toyota has become the founder of the Lean system of manufacturing. Most of the
early adherents to this system were other large Japanese companies, and responsible for the Japanese manufacturing miracle since the 1960's, as it was adapted from automotive to all manner of industries.
The book is well written and interesting even though it is based on an MIT study of global trends in the auto industry. I would like to see an update to this book. The one anomaly I see is the German Automobile industry. If Japan and Korea have some of the most efficient auto manufacturing plants in the world and
North America is becoming more competitive, what is happening in Europe comes as no surprise. Many European automakers have yet to fully embrace American mass production techniques and are now faced with the greater efficiencies of Lean
production. The book does not explain in my mind the success of the German Auto industry. It seems to be the one exception to the rule.

_The Machine the Changed the World_ by Womack, Jones & Roos is nominally about how Japanese carmakers came up with new ways to meet some difficult challenges. But really, it is about lean manufacturing and why lean manufacturing should be successor to current mass-production methods.

The authors did much of their research for the book while working at the International Motor Vehicle Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That program was sponsored by a large number of car companies who wanted to understand why the Japanese way of manufacturing (especially as practiced by Toyota) had had such different results from older American & European car companies.

Consequently, the book does focus entirely on the automotive industry. Originally, the first automobiles were custom-made (and often handmade) to the exact specifications of individual buyers, who were usually quite wealthy. Henry Ford wanted to get beyond that and create an automobile that did not need hand-fitting and hand-crafting of every single piece, and that could be built by people who had not already spent ten years in an apprenticeship for a very specific and specialized craft. In his efforts to get beyond the craftsman era, Ford developed a lot of the concepts and attitudes that still define mass-production today.

For decades, manufacturers and especially car assemblers from all over the world would make a pilgrimage to Ford Motor Co. to better understand what wondrous thing this was that Ford had created. Among those was Eiji Toyoda, a member of the family that had founded Toyota Motor Company. While he found much of Ford's work interesting, he also saw a lot of wasted time & effort. Furthermore, Toyota was faced with some challenges that neither Ford (Ford Motor Co.) or Alfred Sloan (General Motors) had ever had to deal with, such as a work force that they almost could not fire, and a severe lack of investment funds.

In dealing with those challenges and in trying to eliminate waste, Toyota Motor Company (and many other Japanese companies) developed what it today known as "lean" manufacturing.

Unfortunately, most presentations of "lean" in the U.S. seem to focus on some of the surface features, such as smaller batch runs, a focus on a neat & orderly work space, and not carrying a lot of inventory.

This is where _The Machine That Changed the World_ really shines, because it explores the thought processes behind the surface features, and explains how lean thinking affects every department of a company, not just manufacturing. The requirements & results of a lean mentality in purchasing, product design, and marketing are all examined as well.

The book was published in 1991, and is therefore a bit dated in some respects. The authors look very favorably towards the Japanese banking & finance system, yet that same system has been having ongoing problems since the mid-1990s. The authors predicted a number of problems -- in marketing, market share, and labor relations -- for GM, Chrysler, and Ford, as well as many of the European auto makers. While I know some of those predictions have come to pass, I would dearly love to see a second edition of this book that goes into more detail about what has happened in the automotive industry during the last 15 years.

Finally, I would have liked to have seen some discussion about implementing a company-wide lean structure in an American company. I have seen references in numerous books to Americans having atypical attitudes regarding individuality vs. other cultures that stress a conformance with society, and while I do believe the lean mentality could (and probably should) be implemented almost anywhere, I think there will be some specific aspects of American culture that will force a slightly different implementation than was done in Japan.

The book was written in 1990 and most of the research was done in the mid-80s. The author is full of ideas on how lean production will save and revolutionize the world auto industry, but I'm interested to find out what's happened since then. One thing I find most interesting is that the author is particularly charmed by Toyota's use of many platforms and their economic feasibility due to their lean production techniques. This was true in the late 80s and early 90s, but was completely done away with until their recent SUV explosion, for the very reason that it was cost ineffective and nobody was buying their unnecessarily diverse models. At any rate, a good book, especially for one who has never heard of lean production before (such as I). I would really enjoy another book that gets more technically specific.

Great book. I am no expert in manufacturing techniques, but I found the book readable, almost like a novel. Gives a good insight into the car industry up to 1990, and I would love to see a second edition of this, given all the changes in the 90's.

The only downside I could find is that the book gets a little repetitive at the end.