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Company
Toyota
Refined lean manufacturing into a discipline studied by factories worldwide.
- Legal name
- Toyota Motor Corporation
- Founder
- Kiichiro Toyoda
- Founded
- 1937
- Country
- Japan
- Industries
- Automotive, Manufacturing
The problem
Sustaining high quality while keeping costs low across enormous production volumes.
The innovation
The Toyota Production System combined just-in-time flow, the ability for any worker to stop the line on a defect, and continuous incremental improvement.
Why it mattered
It showed that quality and low cost are not opposites — that removing waste improves both.
Lasting impact
Lean and kaizen practices spread across global manufacturing and, later, software and services.