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Toyota's management system, more formally known as the Toyota production system (TPS) is one of the most benchmarked business improvement strategies in modern industry. While many companies try to emulate Toyota's success using a variety of different approaches, most practitioners are not aware how Toyota replicates TPS at suppliers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the in‐house capabilities that are transferred from Toyota to suppliers as a way to more deeply understand how TPS can evolve.

This work studies Toyota's supplier development practices by evaluating organizational documents using latent semantic analysis (LSA). LSA is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual‐usage and meaning of words and phrases by statistical computation applied to text. LSA is based on singular value decomposition (SVD), which is a mathematical matrix decomposition technique using factor analysis.

This work shows that Toyota targets processes, rather than whole systems, in assisting suppliers to be more effective at abnormality management. Findings also show that Toyota's approval process doesn't necessarily support major kaizen at suppliers yet does encourage minor day‐to‐day kaizen. Finally, this work reports that the Toyota Way for suppliers does not have to be adopted by suppliers, but does represent “A Way” to interact with suppliers to drive both culture and productivity simultaneously.

The paper uses a new method for analyzing Toyota's supplier development practices by mathematically representing and analyzing Toyota's organizational documents. This new method allows various components and features of Toyota's supplier development process to be represented and described in a way that offers many unique insights.

Toyota's success in the automotive industry has been attributed to many factors, one of which is their systematic company‐wide problem‐solving approach. While Toyota's structured framework for thinking through problems may offer some interesting insight, it is speculated that how they develop and train their managers to share this thinking with their employees is the key to implementation. The purpose of this paper is to share these issues.

This work utilizes a new and novel technique to examine how Toyota trains and develops their managers to support problem solving. A form of data mining will be used in this research combined with Singular Value Decomposition to mathematically analyze organizational documents from Toyota.

The findings of this research show that the role of management is essential to the successful application of problem solving at Toyota. Results indicate that managers are trained to provide more intense coaching early on the front end of problem solving, specifically in step 2 problem breakdown, so that decision making and involvement of employees can occur more naturally in developing countermeasures.

This research method is solely based on mathematical and statistically analysis of organizational documents to reveal important and latent criteria critical for effectiveness.

This paper provides new insights and understanding of Toyota's 8‐step problem‐solving process. The role of management has been identified as an essential element in coaching and developing employees in the implementation of a company‐wide, systematic problem‐solving methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Toyota's production levelling process in an attempt to understand the various social and technical factors required to produce to a changing market. Unfortunately, most outsiders who explore production levelling do not realize that it involves various departments outside of manufacturing. Consequently, due to the dynamic nature of production levelling many unintended social and management factors between departments makes cooperation difficult.

This paper conducts a case study at one of Toyota's automobile plants to examine the level of departmental and social integration that is applied when implementing production levelling. Based on observations, the problems of production levelling are analyzed and, accordingly, possible solutions are explored.

The findings of this work show that Toyota achieves production levelling because it is viewed as a company‐wide activity that cuts across many departments in promoting manufacturing consistency. Production levelling criteria include both the design and manufacturing aspects which brings evidence that manufacturing is limited in its ability to eliminate and reduce market fluctuation. The work also illustrates that Toyota reinforces departmental cooperation through its human resources policies, and many other unique management mechanisms.

The paper provides new insight on how Toyota achieves production levelling by considering a more holistic and social‐technical approach. In particular, interdepartmental activities are emphasized in achieving company‐wide goals that impact how departments agree to operate.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify Toyota's managerial values known as the Toyota Way to understand the cultural aspects of the Toyota production system (TPS).

The research methodology in this paper utilizes latent semantic analysis and singular value decomposition to analyze corporate memory documents to determine from organizational view how TPS is prescribed ideally to achieve Toyota's culture.

This work shows that the Toyota Way heavily centers on the principle of Genchi Genbutsu which is the practice of seeing problems first hand. Findings also show that Toyota's widely popularized Kaizen philosophy is de‐emphasized compared to team work and respect for people. Toyota's culture is somewhat balanced between individualism and collectivism which disagrees with most national Asian cultures. Finally, results show that Toyota reinforces both long‐ and short‐term orientations which disagree with most national views of Japan's national culture.

Future work using latent semantic analysis should include a broader spectrum of literature on which to perform the analysis. This analysis is limited to developing theories about Toyota's culture but does not actually describe the culture that exist in the workplace.

This work provides a broad guideline with which to structure a lean culture. It provides the reader with knowledge of what parts of a corporate culture to deem the most significant. Improving upon each of these company values with the weighted significance elicited in this document could provide a positive impact within an organization.

The methodology used in this paper is a brand new, fledgling technique that could provide significant improvements in studying lean cultures. The concepts of this technique will be useful to researchers in this field and the results will be of value to management who wish to create a more efficient organization.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Toyota's management directed kaizen activities named Jishuken. Currently, there are many variations in understanding how Toyota develops its managers to support daily kaizen, especially when Toyota managers have different levels of understanding of Toyota production system (TPS) and skills essential in applying TPS.

This paper will study Toyota's Jishuken process in the context of strengthening TPS and analyze both the technical and management aspects of Toyota's Jishuken process.

When integrated into plant‐wide long‐term continuous improvement, Jishukens can be extremely effective at developing management's ability to conduct and to teach others to conduct daily kaizen and problem solving. This paper shows how Jishukens function within the TPS system to continuously improve managers' understanding of TPS both for their own concrete problem solving and to support manager's roles in communicating, coaching and teaching problem solving to production workers.

Most attempts to imitate Toyota fail because techniques are adopted piecemeal with little understanding of why they exist or what kind of organizational culture is needed to keep them alive. Jishuken serves as an example of a technique which is successful only when embedded within the right organizational culture.

True lean transformation has proved notoriously difficult for non‐Toyota companies. One hypothesis is excessive focus on tools/techniques without building the necessary organizational culture. However, empirical evidence is not available to confirm (or refute) this hypothesis. The complex question of the relationship between an organization's culture and its ability to implement lean is a long‐term effort. As a first step, the purpose of this paper is to offer the results of a survey conducted to discover the relative (in)consistency of lean cultures in terms of values held explicitly.

A survey tool was developed to compare what employees of lean (or attempting to be lean) organizations say explicitly about what their culture values. The Toyota Way, considered by Toyota as guiding its values, was used as the basis to develop the survey which was administered to individuals in several different organizations.

A higher degree of lean implementation in a company was assumed to show more consistent organizational values (in explicit form). However, the responses varied even from the company considered a leader in lean implementation. Though not conclusive, these preliminary findings suggest that the relationship between cultural type, explicit values and successful lean practice should be examined further.

No empirical studies have investigated the role of culture in success with lean transformations. This paper presents an initial attempt at addressing that issue with a tool developed to evaluate what an organization's culture says its values are, in terms of what is important for lean implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and validate a framework for improving efficiency in road transport based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and personnel participation. The use of the “Overall Equipment Effectiveness” (OEE) indicator is widespread in factories. The framework adapts OEE to transport management.

Research was divided into two phases. The first phase included development of a participative framework, which was based on the authors’ experience and a literature review related to transport KPIs. The second phase involved the validation of the framework, adopting an “Action Research” approach by leading its implementation in a Spanish retailer.

Implementation of the framework has promoted more efficient transport in the company. The framework could be extrapolated to other companies, particularly, transport and parcel companies. By applying the “Action Research” approach it has been shown that researchers and practitioners can create knowledge by resolving problems that are of interest to both parties.

The framework has been applied in one company and could achieve broader validation. Additionally, integrating only indicators of transport efficiency into the OEE proposal has meant that other perspectives, such as costs or the environment, have not been dealt with directly.

The framework is a new line of research applied to transport management. The academic and business contributions fall into three areas: transport management, organizational change and the methodology. There are few examples that illustrate “Action Research” adoption within the scope of supply chain management.