RULES....3

 Four Rules - The Toyota Way 

The tacit knowledge that underlies the Toyota Production System can be captured in four basic rules. These rules guide the design, operation, and improvement of every activity, connection, and pathway for every product and service. The rules are as follows:


Rule 1:All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, and outcome.

Rule 2:Every customer-supplier connection must be direct, and there must be an unambiguous yes-or-no way to send requests and receive responses.

Rule 3:The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct.

Rule 4:Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization.

All the rules require that activities, connections, and flow paths have built-in tests to signal problems automatically. It is the continual response to problems that makes this seemingly rigid system so flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances. How Toyota's Workers Learn the Rules
If the rules of the Toyota Production System aren't explicit, how are they transmitted? Toyota's managers don't tell workers and supervisors specifically how to do their work. Rather, they use a teaching and learning approach that allows their workers to discover the rules as a consequence of solving problems. For example, the supervisor teaching a person the principles of the first rule will come to the work site and, while the person is doing his or her job, ask a series of questions:


How do you do this work?
How do you know you are doing this work correctly?
How do you know that the outcome is free of defects?
What do you do if you have a problem?

This continuing process gives the person increasingly deeper insights into his or her own specific work. From many experiences of this sort, the person gradually learns to generalize how to design all activities according to the principles embodied in rule 1.

All the rules are taught in a similar Socratic fashion of iterative questioning and problem solving. Although this method is particularly effective for teaching, it leads to knowledge that is implicit. Consequently, the Toyota Production System has so far been transferred successfully only when managers have been able and willing to engage in a similar process of questioning to facilitate learning by doing.