Reducing Customer Wait Times and Saving Sight with the Toyota Production System

Jamie Bonini, VP, Toyota Production System Support Center at Toyota, joined us at the American Automotive Summit to discuss “Driving Profitability for the Future: Redefining Competitiveness through Achieving and Sustaining Lean Excellence.”

Bonini describes the Toyota Production System as “an organizational culture of highly engaged people that come to work every day to do their work and make their work better.” This culture is created and sustained by a system that has three elements: a philosophy (on how to operate and how to treat your people), some technical tools, and a managerial role, which is to relentlessly engage and develop people to solve problems to drive improvement.

The Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) aims to share this organizational culture to improve businesses and the world. Their mission is “to contribute to society by sharing the Toyota Production System (TPS) with nonprofits, government entities, and manufacturers throughout North America to better serve customers or people in need.”

Bonini shared with the audience a few case studies about how they are bringing the TPS approach to varied organizations, including a family-owned job shop making stainless steel components in Chicago, and the State of New York. One case that was particularly touching was about the work they have done at an ophthalmology clinic in Los Angeles, where TSSC has applied TPS to reduce speed and wait times for eye surgeries.

Before TPS, the clinic had very long wait times, and people were going blind because the waiting time to get the procedure was too long. With TPS, they have taken a surgical backlog that was hundreds of patients long and eliminated!

Watch the video case study here:

We are thrilled to announce Jamie Bonini will be joining us again at the American Manufacturing Summit, giving a leadership spotlight on “Driving Sustainable Results: Top Management’s Role in Successful TPS Implementation”. Register today to join the conversation!  VIEW THE PROGRAM