By Art Smalley
This article is from the Superfactory Archives, an archive of content from the Superfactory website that existed from 1997 to 2012.
Editor's Note : Isao “Ike” Kato spent 35 years with Toyota Motor Corporation in a variety of management positions in manufacturing, HR, training and development, and supplier development. Early in his career Ike was responsible for guiding external consultant Shigeo Shingo around Toyota facilities. Ike also worked extensively developing training material for TPS under the direction of Taiichi Ohno and other executives.
Mr. Shigeo Shingo taught a basic industrial engineering course at Toyota Motor Corporation starting in November of 1955. It was called the P-course internally and the P stood for production. Years later he taught this same course and a couple other topics in Toyota’s supplier ranks as well. During the 1960’s and up until about 1980 I organized his courses and the training materials, as well as coordinated the majority of his visits inside the parent company. Before that time one of my colleagues did. Despite several myths and rumors to the contrary Mr. Shingo mainly taught the P-course at Toyota and he was not a regular advisor to Mr. Taiichi Ohno or any other senior executives of the company at that time. In fact he rarely met with any of them. However his association with Toyota Motor Corporation as both an instructor and occasional consultant did continue for close to 30 years and it was quite beneficial to both sides although not for the reasons frequently assumed by external parties. For those interested in the facts I will explain Mr. Shingo’s actual role in more detail on the following pages.
As Mr. Shingo himself pointed out in writing his relationship with Toyota Motor Corporation centered around teaching the P-course between 1955 and 1980 approximately eighty times to about 3,000 participants. There were actually five different versions of the P-course. There were four basic ones and also a longer version that combined all the different elements together which was offered every three or four years. I will outline the course material below so that you see the nature of the content yourself. The participants in the course were primarily engineers in manufacturing and a few production supervisors. Teaching eighty courses averages out to visiting Toyota about three times per year over the many years in question. The vast majority of Mr. Shingo’s time was actually spent with other companies such as Matsushita Electric Corporation which is not usually pointed out in all fairness or accuracy.
From 1956-1958 Mr. Shingo taught a version of the P-Course at Toyota about every month. After that period however the frequency was reduced to four times per year and then later it eventually tapered off even further to once or twice per year due to declining needs for the course. In the beginning the course was taught as a “stay over” event where the participants remained overnight in the company training center. In the early days of his training courses Mr. Shingo stayed over at Toyota as well many times to visit with the participants and it was this sort of enthusiasm in training that earned Mr. Ohno’s initial approval.
In the following tables I will outline the different versions of the P-Course. The contents of these workshops were eventually summarized in several of Mr. Shingo’s books published by Nikkan Kogyo Shinbunsha in Japan between 1958 and 1980. As they became available the books were handed out as texts for the class as well. These books were the most recognized works of Mr. Shingo by Toyota or anyone in Japan up until 1980. The contents have not been translated into English except for a few sections and are no longer re-published in Japan due to lack of sales. If you actually read Mr. Shingo’s initial books from Nikkan Kogyo however you can learn his views at the time and his thoughts on production. Today unfortunately he is known only by his latter books after 1980 which were later translated into in English. This partial translation of his work has helped contribute to a series of misunderstandings about the actual role and type of services he provided to Toyota. First however let me outline his P-course material for parties interested in the actual contents.
As you can see from the outline of Mr. Shingo’s courses there is nothing directly related to the more famous elements of the Toyota Production System. In other words he did not teach or self develop anything that relates to JIT, Jidoka, Kanban, Standardized Work, or other TPS items. He mainly taught different ways to look at the production process in detail from an industrial engineering point of view which is his specialty. These were important skills that Mr. Ohno and other managers in the company possessed but our engineers and supervisors did not in 1955. Most people don’t realize that Mr. Shingo was largely working in a class room training role at Toyota for most of his visits. Each course visited the shop floor for a few observations and exercises to practice different analysis methods and improvement techniques outlined above. The participants were then expected to use these skills and techniques upon returning to their respective areas after the course.
To put things in proper context Mr. Ohno’s primary management direction during this time was to drive production improvements in order to eliminate waste to reduce cost and improve productivity in manufacturing. The efforts of Mr. Ohno and his chief group of managers alone however were not sufficient to meet all the aggressive goals of the company. Consequently it was important for Toyota as an organization to develop greater numbers of engineers and supervisors who could actively participate in improvement efforts as well. The P-course contributed to this type of skills development for people in the manufacturing organization. It replaced an earlier training course called Job Methods from the TWI training programs we previously used in the company. The P-course content was more detailed and varied than the JM course so we adopted it instead as a part of our training curriculum for supervisors and engineers.
Students of TPS are probably aware that Mr. Ohno always maintained a top management philosophy that emphasized the overall production system. He stressed profitability and cost reduction from different view points such as total quality, efficiency, lead-time and overall system productivity. If you read Mr. Shingo’s books published by Nikkan Kogyo in Japan on kaizen techniques you will see that he originally was a much narrower specialist who looked at production mainly from the view point of an operation or a process. His views evolved over time as he studied Toyota which I will comment on later. Unfortunately since neither his initial books nor the P-course materials were fully translated into English this reality is lost on non- Japanese speakers. Regardless however this emphasis is a primary difference in how Mr. Ohno viewed Toyota’s production system versus how Mr. Shingo typically viewed process improvement.
Over the years as a result of Mr. Shingo’s instructional efforts the P-course did indeed produce success in contributing to the development of manufacturing engineers and supervisors in Toyota. In turn these people improved processes in Toyota in line with Mr. Ohno’s priorities and goals. Thus it is accurate to state that the P-course both helped to improve work as well as to achieve one of the aims related to human resource development that Mr. Ohno and top management had set out for my department.
Unfortunately the success that Mr. Shingo experienced in instructing the P-course at Toyota also apparently led him and later others outside the company to believe that he created parts of the Toyota Production System. While he is indeed a contributor to the success of Toyota in the area of skills development however that does not make him an inventor of the system in any way. For example the establishment of the principles of Jidoka and JIT actually predate Mr. Shingo’s involvement in the company by several decades. These concepts were put forth by Sakichi Toyoda and Kiichiro Toyoda respectively and were well implemented by Mr. Ohno and other key personnel long before Mr. Shingo visited Toyota in late 1955 for the first time.
Please note that not even Mr. Ohno claims to have invented these foundational concepts. Most of Mr. Ohno’s experiments with process flow, JIT, kanban, supermarkets, multi-process handling, stop the line, etc. were conducted in his engine machine shops in the period between 1948 and 1955. To state that Mr. Shingo co-invented or taught him all this somehow is simply erroneous and lacks any factual perspective regarding the actual sequence of events from the period. Mr. Shingo’s visits began in late 1955 after much of TPS was in fact fairly well developed inside the company. In Mr. Ohno’s writing he states that between 1945 and 1955 he was merely applying the concepts of Sakichi and Kiichiro Toyoda and other practices he observed at the spinning and weaving part of the company from which he originally came that also built automatic looms. He properly gave credit to the Toyoda family and other many members of his internal group such as Mr. Suzumura and Mr. Mamiya that helped develop the system.
For the record I think it is important to point out that that Mr. Shingo taught the exact same versions of his P-course at Matsushita Electric Corporation and many other Japanese companies far more often than he taught at Toyota. Interestingly however these efforts did not result in the establishment of an overall production system at any other location. Nor did he later write entire books about those other companies at which he taught. It was mainly engineering training and skills development and not overall system implementation type of work. Toyota’s production system development is truly unique in that it was adapted and created internally by trial and error over many years.
You might be surprised to learn that regarding actual Toyota Production System implementation Mr. Shingo was initially quite critical of our production methods and ideas for improvement as they differed from his own thoughts on process improvement. His attitude shifted in 1973 however when the first draft of a TPS manual entitled “The Toyota Production System for Cost Reduction” was written by several managers including recent president of the company Mr. Fujio Cho and a now retired manager named Mr. Sugimori. You might recall that during this period there was an oil shock to the economy of Japan due to an embargo placed upon the world by the OPEC nations. During this period of rising factor costs Toyota was the only major company in Japan to make a profit including all of Mr. Shingo’s other clients. Until this time Mr. Shingo had shown fairly little interest in learning about our overall concept of a production system or the two pillars of Just-in-Time and Jidoka or even Standardized Work for that matter.
After our surprise financial performance however and our gift to him of a TPS manual he noticeably became quite keen to learn more. It was around this time period in the mid 1970’s that Mr. Shingo started studying the Toyota Production System from different angles and began asking detailed questions over the next several years. Eventually this culminated around 1980 when in Japan he then published a book on TPS, “A Study of the Toyota Production System from an Industrial Engineering Viewpoint”. This book was later translated into English and became famous overseas. The book is quite good and the title is factually correct in stating that he was indeed studying Toyota’s production system and attempting to provide his views on the topic. After publication of this book and the ensuing attention he received however he noticeably seemed to take on more of an attitude outside of Toyota that he had invented the system somehow. This trend unfortunately has been repeated over the years as different academics and consultants write about TPS or Lean Manufacturing and receive similar attention. None however have ever been able to duplicate the system with much success outside of Toyota.
Around 1974 we slightly changed the contents and delivery of the P-course. A brief up front section commenting on the Toyota Production System and the importance of kaizen were inserted which we of course encouraged. On a more troublesome note however Mr. Shingo also attempted to have the shop floor observation parts of the P-course take place in the newest part of the factory where our latest equipment and tooling were being installed. In hindsight he was looking for examples to include in his various works depicting different aspects of TPS. As the training course organizer I struggled quite a bit with this maneuvering on his part as there were frankly aspects of the system that we did not yet want shown to the outside world. Amusingly just observing some of these new processes however seemed to further convince Mr. Shingo that he had invented them somehow even though it was not possible. Equipment and tooling is specified and procured outside of the plant by a special central production engineering group (Seisan Gijutsubu) in Toyota. By the mid 1970’s much of it came from Toyoda Machine Works an affiliated company which built our machining equipment for example. Neither group interacted with Mr. Shingo or attend his training sessions since he was teaching at the factory level for manufacturing engineers and supervisors.
In Japan Mr. Shingo’s role and contribution to education and training in the realm of industrial engineering is well chronicled and appreciated. Overseas however it appears that it is misunderstood due the partial translation of his materials and a lack of any rudimentary fact checking. As a result verbal stories and anecdotes have come to pass for history instead of rigorous research and verification. Contributing to the situation Mr. Shingo became more widely known in the U.S. than in Japan and started to infer in discussions with different parties outside of Japan that he had developed much of TPS himself. He advised many people to go tour Toyota facilities and see the production system. Mr. Shingo knew that it was difficult to get approval for plant such tours in Toyota so he skipped the official path of making requests through the Public Relations Department and he passed them directly onto us in the Education and Training Department. Since we had known him for a long time it was difficult in our culture to turn him down. For a couple of years we accepted such requests. However he took advantage of the situation over time and the requests grew too numerous to accommodate. We finally had to tell him to direct his requests officially through the normal Public Relations Department for consideration. Consequently these plant tour requests from him then came to a complete stop.
Let me be perfectly clear for the record. What Mr. Ohno expected from Mr. Shingo internally at Toyota was help in developing the organizational ability to see and think about how to make process improvements in manufacturing. There was never any expectation from Mr. Ohno regarding the overall Toyota Production System. In reality there were only perhaps 4-5 times in Toyota where Mr. Shingo and Mr. Ohno met in formal sit down style discussion meetings over the decades in question. The rest were very brief encounters on the shop floor or when Mr. Ohno briefly dropped in to observe the participants of the training sessions. These meetings were not about overall TPS implementation at all. Mainly the discussions related to simple updates regarding the P-course and other general improvement topics in Toyota. I was once however requested by Mr. Shingo to set up a meeting with Mr. Ohno specifically to discuss the merits of the Toyota Production System but the meeting was actually turned down by Mr. Ohno. He felt that his position and corresponding views on production were sufficiently different from Mr. Shingo’s and he did not care to debate what he anticipated to be a lot of academic detail. I had the delicate job of conveying this message to Mr. Shingo and it contributed to other tensions at the time.
None the less overseas there continues in some circles to be a misunderstanding that Mr. Shingo somehow invented the system that the Toyoda family, Mr. Ohno and so many other internal people worked to develop. This notion is apparently perpetuated by well intended publishers and editors of Mr. Shingo’s works from after 1980 when he finished his studies of TPS at Toyota. Unfortunately these parties have been somewhat lax in conducting any basic fact checks or background verifications of the actual situation. Additionally most of the anecdotes that are told about Mr. Shingo regarding his involvement at Toyota are actually from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when he also started working with Toyota tier one suppliers such as Toyoda Boshoku and Toyoda Gosei for example. These companies are of course affiliated with and partly owned by Toyota but they are separate financial and legal entities. The similar sounding names (Toyota and Toyoda) no doubt contribute to the confusion by non Japanese speaking parties. This additional work by Mr. Shingo while indeed useful in the supply base was in fact decades after the development of TPS internally at Toyota. Also it should be noted that the majority of supplier development with respect to TPS training was handled by Toyota’s Operations Management Consulting Division (OMCD) starting in 1973 and not by Mr. Shingo at all. He was indeed a form of assistance in training and consulting to these companies but he was not their main source of learning for TPS.
Lastly there is also the unfortunate and confusing history of Mr. Shingo’s involvement in set up reduction work at Toyota. In 1983 he published a book describing his development of the SMED concept at Toyota based upon a set up reduction workshop in 1969. The book was not looked upon favorably by many at Toyota and it never enjoyed much success in Japan either. The reason is that the depiction of his involvement at Toyota contained several errors and did not point out other relevant facts. For example he listed a Mr. Sugimori as division manager of stamping at Toyota. Mr. Sugimori was a famous production control manager in the company but he was not in the stamping department as a production manager. Furthermore Mr. Shingo describes his involvement on a stamping press in 1969. In fact we did arrange for Mr. Shingo to participate in such an event but it was on a forging press and not a stamping press.
I suppose the above two points are minor errors he could have simply forgotten or confused by the time he wrote his book on set up reduction many years later in 1983. The bigger problem however is his failure to mention that Toyota had been working on set up reduction since the late 1940’s continually without his involvement. In 1955 it is critical to note that Mr. Ohno specifically purchased stamping equipment from the U.S. with rapid die change features from the Danly Corporation. These machines plus the ongoing improvement efforts resulted in an average company wide changeover time in all stamping departments of 15 minutes in 1962. By the mid 1960’s the single minute mark was already in evidence on many isolated machines in the company. By 1971 the company average was down to a mere three minutes in stamping. Oddly this fact is even recognized in the back of Mr. Shingo’s own book studying Toyota in a sample timeline of TPS development that we provided him many years ago. It is also noted elsewhere in other books by different authors as well such as Michael Cusumano’s history of the Japanese automobile industry.
The set up reduction story that Mr. Shingo vividly described in his SMED book was actually in historical hindsight on one of the last machines in the company to be converted to single minute changeover performance. To be fair I am not even sure how well Mr. Shingo realized this key point as it was his only extended involvement in set up reduction inside Toyota Motor Corporation. None the less it is still accurate in my opinion to give proper credit to Mr. Shingo for codifying the steps for SMED, coining the name, and making the critical distinction between internal and external work. He should also of course be acknowledged for teaching the concept to other companies especially in the West. However Toyota achieved the actual level of sub ten minute die change performance long before he apparently realized it or ever accomplished it himself.
I’m sure many people overseas have some personal connection and sense of allegiance to Mr. Shingo but it is no more in comparison to the two decades I spent coordinating his visits to Toyota and probably far less. For the record I also have no financial incentive to gain advancing the historical role of Mr. Shingo at Toyota. My interest is merely in providing the truth, correcting a few misconceptions, and giving proper credit where credit is due. Simple elementary checks would show the different errors that have been communicated and repeated over the years. I personally view such continual misrepresentations of the actual historical development of TPS as disrespectful to Mr. Ohno, his internal group of protégé’s, the Toyoda family members, and numerous other parties that earlier worked so hard establishing the foundational elements of the system.
It is also not fair or accurate in my opinion to misconstrue the proper legacy of Mr. Shingo and the type of credit he does honestly deserve. He was a great instructor and contributor to the body of general TPS knowledge as an author especially in the West. No one has ever disputed this point. Furthermore he deserves credit and recognition as an author, consultant, and instructor regarding development of specific shop floor improvement kaizen techniques as well as helping to develop human resources in Toyota. His instructional efforts and lectures on the Scientific Thinking Mechanism he outlined contributed heavily to the kaizen training course in Toyota for engineers and supervisors even after the P-course was discontinued. Any claims that he somehow invented the Toyota production system especially concepts like process flow, JIT, Jidoka, or standardized work, etc. however are deeply flawed and simply misconstrued by uninformed parties.
In this summary I have attempted to clarify the role of Mr. Shingo, his P-course for industrial engineering, and his actual involvement with Toyota for interested parties. The P-course in particular contributed significantly to the development of engineers and supervisors with regards to their ability to see and think about shop floor kaizen at the process level in Toyota. Anyone who ever took his course in Toyota would agree to this statement and we all thank him for his contribution in this area. However that is quite different from stating that Mr. Shingo personally developed or created the primary elements of the Toyota Production System created by the Toyoda family, Mr. Ohno and so many other members of his managerial group. There is simply no person in Toyota Motor Corporation that thinks Mr. Shingo invented TPS even those who value and respect his courses and teachings as much as I do. I would like these facts made clear for the record.