> establishing a culture of quality control that helped Toyota evolve into a world-leading automaker. A lot of the JIT stuff that is so common, these days, was revolutionary, when he introduced it. I'm told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work.
> I'm told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work The “kanban” interfaces definitely originate from Toyota. Scrum was influenced by Toyota’s management techniques, among others. I believe other familiar concepts, e.g. “kaizen” or continuous improvement, also originate from Toyota.
But it was them learning a lot from working on looms, and other stuff at textile mills taught them how to max productivity.
Textiles making was already a very competitive industry in late 19th century, and the only way to push forward in productivity after looms were optimized to the max was to cut slack in between machines — management techniques.
There the manufacturers were stealing each other's ideas "within months" as Japan had no enforceable Western style patent system yet.
The electric andon was for example copied from Suzuki looms, where it prevented looms from dethreading when the machine runs out of thread, and requiring hours to manually rethread it again.
Stopping the entire mill for a few minutes to recharge a loom begins to make much more sense when you understand that the alternative is to stop it for hours.