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 | 
 enlarge | Authors: James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 59578
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0743299795
Dewey Decimal Number: 337
EAN: 9780743299794
ASIN: 0743299795
Publication Date: March 13, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Becoming Lean and Mean! June 21, 2008
Lean production (now frequently called Lean manufacturing) has melded into several industries here in the United States, but back when this book was written, it was just catching on. I read the book in 2000. Many of the concepts are still worthwhile in this book, both for the historical significance as well as the lean ideas presented.
The Machine that Changed the World is a fascinating book that teaches what the Japanese learned and how to apply their ideas to the US auto market. Competition is always tough, but these tools provides a competitive advantage to those companies who embrace them and make them part of doing business. Not all ideas are applicable to every application, but there are plenty of diamonds to be farmed here.
Well trained employees, a commitment to excellence by everyone (from the janitor to the CEO), teamwork, flexibility of skill sets, and learning lessons from successes and failures are all important elements of lean manufacturing. Setting up manufacturing lines efficiently, working closely with suppliers, line smoothing, encouraging innovative and cost saving suggestions and much more are also critical lean concepts.
Lean manufacturing doesn't happen overnight and a company and its employees must be diligent in their efforts to put high quality products at reasonable prices out the door.
The Machine that Changed the World is highly rated by many people and should be. It has timeless ideas to produce higher quality products and recommends never being completely satisfied. Well written and researched, this is a top notch book!
The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking
Really good book April 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have read a lot of the so called quality books, and have a master's degree in the field, and I have found few books that had this kind of relevance to how things are produced and why they work or don't work. More importantly, this is one of the few 'academic studies' (I recall this one came out of MIT) that is actually clearly written and straightforward.
Yes, Toyota is much of the focus in this book and it can sometimes seem to border on the PR level, but that doesn't take away from the information in this book. Having had access to most of the auto manufacturers when this study was done, and seeing the nuts and bolts, it is what people do wrong at other places that is as important as what Toyota had been doing right (a trend, I might add, that in recent years has dimmed, Toyota has had embarassing quality faults recently). The book does mention that what Toyota "pioneered" was not entirely homegrown, many of the techniques existed, but Toyota was unique in the auto world in the number of things they chose to adopt (as a counterpoint, when the 70's hit and the US auto makers started having real competition, they hired Dr. Edwards Demming as a consultant, he told them many of the things that this book points out and they basically paid the check, used it for PR about how they were serious, and ignored him).
And these are not new issues and continue to plague companies, fallacies like:
1)"It is the fault of the labor force"..while the UAW has not exactly been cutting edge, what this book points out is something known in quality circles for years, that most of the problems are using your labor force badly, not listening to them, and just plain bad management.
2)"The secret is robotics"..GM under good ole Roger Smith spent umpteen billions of dollars on robots, and their cars were still crap (and even better, when GM and Toyota did a joint factory in California in around 1980, they discovered that the most hi tech thing in the plant was a secretary's typewriter)
3)"Cheap Labor"....nuff said about that
4)"We could build as good a car as them (meaning Toyota, Nissan, etc) if we built only a few models". Problem? Toyota had more product lines then any of the big 3 at the time.
5)"We have team labor".....on the surface, yes, but when looked at you find the same old hierarchical management and decisions made by beancounters.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned in this book, and some surprises (anyone wanna know why Benz bought Chrysler? Benz production capability is one of the lousiest in the world as written about in this book, and I hear it isn't much better today).
One of the things that this book teaches is that a lot of the cost of vehicles is based in bad design, poor management and in an attitude that problems, no matter how small, can be overlooked. People are asking how developed countries can compete with third world labor, this tells how.
Industrial Classic December 11, 2007
Just an excellent research effort -- one of best I've read -- I'd compare with Jim Collins Good/Great and Built to Last work. I'd recommend...
 Over rated. July 9, 2007
4 out of 12 found this review helpful
The Machine That Changed the World and the subsequent articles that Mr. Womack has written for the Wall Street Journal almost make him look like a shill for Toyota. This book either omits or minimizes the importance of developments that lead Toyota to the Toyota Production System. I expected a more independent and intellectually honest viewpoint because Mr. Womack passes himself off as a top academic.
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