An American supermarket taught him more about manufacturing than any factory he had ever visited.
Taiichi Ohno was born in Dalian, China, in 1912 and graduated from Nagoya Technical High School in Japan. He joined Toyoda Spinning in 1932 and transferred to the Toyota Motor Company in 1943, where he started as a shop-floor supervisor in engine manufacturing.1
When Ohno arrived, Toyota's production levels were a fraction of what American automakers achieved. The company sent him to study Ford's facilities in the United States. The tour was instructive, but the insight that reshaped his thinking came from a different American institution: the supermarket.2
American supermarkets stocked shelves based on what customers actually purchased, replenishing only what had been taken. Ohno adapted this principle to manufacturing. Instead of producing components in massive batches and storing them in warehouses, each station on the assembly line would produce only what the next station needed, exactly when it needed it.3
He called this approach just-in-time production. To manage the flow of materials, he developed the kanban system, a set of visual cards that signaled when a workstation needed replenishment. He also identified seven categories of waste, which he called muda, that consumed resources without creating value.4
The Toyota Production System took decades to develop. Ohno rose from shop-floor supervisor to executive vice president by 1975, refining the system at each level. His 1978 book, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, was translated into English in 1988 and became one of the most influential management texts of the twentieth century.5
Ohno retired from Toyota in 1978 and died on May 28, 1990, in Toyota City, Japan. James Womack and Daniel Jones's 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World introduced the term "lean manufacturing" to describe Ohno's system for Western audiences.6 In 2022, Ohno was posthumously inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. His methods are now applied in hospitals, software companies, and government agencies that have never produced a single automobile.