Henry Ford and Toyota Production System ..

We all know Henry Ford was the doyen behind the introduction of affordable motor cars for the traveling public of the world in 1912 with the introduction of the Model T Ford motor car in the US. 

Going through Henry Ford's autobiography, My Life and Work, published in 1922, while talking of workplace organisation, hygiene, cleanliness, orderliness, vendor relationships, innovation etc, it gently reminds us that the original principles of efficient low cost production was proposed by Henry Ford around the 1920s itself. 

I get a feeling that the Toyota Production System principles were originally proposed by Henry Ford around 1920s. The only TPS/lean manufacturing thinking I find lacking then, is the unit type of production, acting against old batch production. The 1914 Harris EOQ model was ruling the world of Inventory management then.

Henry Ford in his autobiography also talks of costs as paid to vendors and prices paid by customers to buy Ford cars. According to Ford, the costs should be lowered and this will ensure that prices at which cars are offered to customers are also lower. If the vendor is not working at full efficiency, what ever products he offers to Ford will be at a higher price. The supplying vendor cannot lower it any further as he is already working at an inefficiency and is unaware of ways and means to lower it any further. This is a challenge for Ford as it cannot reduce the prices at which cars are offered to customers. 

Ford found a solution to this. Why not make everything by itself from scratch, from steel to tyres to parts. This will ensure that the same high level thinking to improve efficiency of production at high quality and lower raw material costs are incurred by Ford and thence charged to the customer through lower prices for Ford products.

I have been engaging the subject of Lean Operations for the past more than ten years in Alliance University Bangalore and have taken lots of industry workshops on the above topic. Little did I know or ever dream that the same principles used by Toyota in the 60s and 70s and later expanded as Lean Manufacturing practiced by world manufacturing and service organisations around 80s, 90s and still continuing, they have all been copied from Ford's production / manufacturing philosophy.

Why could not Ford motor company carry forward the revolutionary thinking on simple and efficient production system to benefit itself in the long run.  Even though I feel Toyota picked up Ford's production philosophy quite late, it was Toyota who could bring the substance, rigour and discipline of efficient production systems in place, result of the discipline in the Japanese systems and culture, so necessary to get high quality production out from the factory.

 

Ford and Edison (L2R) 1927 ..

In the book we even find how Ford encourages and implements the plans proposed by his shop floor workmen to improve workplace efficiency, what we in Japanese call as the Kaizen, more systematic and orderly application of incremental continual innovation on the Japanese shop floor. Ford believed that the line worker in touch with the machine and the process was most empowered and knowledgeable of innovations and changes that could be brought to products or processes on the production line more than anyone else on the shop floor, even the CEO.

The autobiography of Henry Ford, the doyen of world automobile sector, titled My life and work, is worth reading for any mechanical, automobile and industrial engineering enthusiast. It opens one's mind not only to the production systems and capability to the 1920s, published in 1922, but also tells us what were the thoughts that went through Henry Ford's mind, far ahead of dreams going thru the minds of existing American and other global manufacturers and customers. 

 

Ford River Rouge factory, Dearbon, Michigan, 1944

In fact, Ford was far ahead of the competition and thought of customer delight and obsession much earlier than any of the modern practitioners like Toyota or Amazon. He was among the first and earliest to propound the lean philosophy thinking to charge the customers less, produce less waste and  offer high quality products at low affordable prices to the masses (Motorolla's six sigma philosophy). 

 

In order not to charge the customers more, he looked at the vendor supply chain, exploring ways and means to reduce vendors costs by efficient working, manufacturing to scale and cheaper availability of resources. The result was Ford had facilities across the whole supply chain right from rubber plantations to produce rubber tyres to owning iron ore mines to produce steel for the automobiles.

Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, turned to the Brazilian rainforest in the 1920s to construct a rubber plantation that would serve as his personal supply of the material. The town, dubbed Fordlandia, was more than an industrial operation — it was Ford's attempt to establish a picturesque American society - Businessinsider, Feb 20

Ford Motor Company once owned 700,000 acres of forest, iron mines and limestone quarries in northern Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ford mines covered thousands of acres of coal-rich land in Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania - www.thehenryford.org

After going through the book, I am more than convinced that the concepts of efficiency and value resulting in customer satisfaction was initially introduced to the world Henry Ford and later carried forward by Taichi Ohno and Sakichi Toyoda from Toyota and others. The world of global manufacturing owes to Henry Ford than to any other personality in post industrial 20th century global manufacturing for bringing in the modern concepts of value and customer obsession.

George.

An analysis of The Republic by Plato, published in 380 BC

I am getting to the end of reading The Republic by Plato (written in 380 BC), the final 50 pages of this massive 400 page philosophical treatise, the first of it's kind on modern day concepts of Justice, Democracy, Mathematics, Music, Gymnastics etc .. This extraordinary philosophical work is said to be the basis on which the modern western thought systems of justice and development is based.

Plato

The Athenian philosopher Plato (c. 428-347 B.C.) is one of the most important figures of the Ancient Greek world and the entire history of Western thought. In his written dialogues he conveyed and expanded on the ideas and techniques of his teacher Socrates. www.history.com. Image courtesy Britannica.com

Plato, student of Socrates, penned his philosophical treatise, the first in the world, contemporary to the Old Testament in the Bible, in his chaste Greek language around 380 BC. Many of the concepts were new to me and I am trying to understand and assimilate them to my thought process. The concept of city states and their armies, medical profession, the equality of the sexes or what is expected of each sex, duties of politicians and administrators,  respect for elders, teaching youngsters gymnastics and music to make them learned and cultured were some interesting concepts discussed in the book. 

The art of fighting in battles, the classification of society into farmers, traders and warriors was interesting to read. The concept of slavery that existed then and of freedom is also penned by Plato. It was not clear whether Plato supported slavery or not. How can a man be just or unjust in his approach made interesting reading. 

Plato was was fortunate enough to be born into a rich family, got good  education under Socrates on knowledge that existed at that time. Towards the end of the book Plato talks of various forms of governance like Aristocracy, Timocracy (only property owners tend to take part in government), Oligarchy, Democracy, Autocracy etc. While reading I could relate his writing and thinking to the present day society.  He speaks how in society oligarchs exist, like Putin of Russia and tyrants like Kim Jong Un of North Korea, 2400 years back itself, and we see such people in present day society.

 

What really surprised me was the very last paragraph of the book where Plato talks of the heavenly way, to be just and of virtue. He agrees the soul is immortal and can endure all forms of goodness and evil. He exhorts all of us to love one another and also respect and love the God who guides over us all.

This writing is my humble, inexperienced, naive analysis and an earnest and sincere attempt to understand and interpret a great philosophical work written 2400 years back. I am too small to interpret and comment on the writing of Plato, but would love to accept the realities of the time and give my very immature comments to the practices of the time.

George 

High time the world shifted to Linux OS

As a humble member of the global teaching fraternity, I do a lot of IT related work that improves my working efficiency.  For example, work on the computer like accessing my official and private email, the Institute portal, use Google documents to prepare documents, write papers, download docs, write blogs, cases, read articles from high quality resources of the web and so on. For the past four years, the interesting part has been that all the above work is cloud based, on remote servers and not on local Institute servers.

Also, all the while over the past five six years, I have been working on a Linux based USB on Ubuntu distribution, to log from my office windows machine through Linux OS and access the Internet. The experience is cool. 

No worries of safety, security, unauthorised access and so on. With double security checks for my Google cloud, it has never failed me the last twenty years, no fears of unauthorised access to the Google cloud. Every time I access the net using Ubuntu Linux, a different IP address is automatically assigned, so it is the most safest way to access the net.

For all personal and office work I use only the Google office suite and access the Google cloud for storage of docs, 15 GB free and for Institute files I access the 100 GB One Drive, which is a Linux based cloud from Microsoft to store and access official files for which our Institute pays Microsoft.

Anyway you look at it, I have not accessed the hard drive on my local machine at College at least for the past 4 years, all the time working on Linux USB. (usually carry four USBs in my bag having four different distros, just for the fun of it). All important files are on my personal Google cloud or the MS office cloud.

Not sure whether I am the only teaching faculty from Alliance University to work on Linux all the time, a practice  continuing  from my IIT Bombay days, thanks to my mentor and guru, Prof. Uday Gaitonde, a die hard Open Source Linux fan.

Using the Google cloud and Google AI for academic purposes have overnight, improved the quality of my understanding and research, better and more effective delivery of teaching material and finally effective student understanding and feedback monitoring mechanisms.

The cloud storage and working has actually simplified my access either through my mobile while traveling, a 10 year old HP laptop at home or the latest desktop machine from office. Thin client technology very much in action.

It is high time the University authorities start slowly discontinuing Microsoft licenses in the uty asking faculty to work the Open source way, install Ubuntu or any Linux distros on all machines, or even use Linux on USB as the learning curve is fast and steep. 

When we know that all the major back-end processes of the world, be it the OneDrive Cloud from Microsoft, social media like Facebook and Whatsapp, Google search and cloud, Youtube servers, Amazon, Netflix, AWS, Enterprise servers etc. you name it, hosted on the cloud, mostly Linux based cloud that can be accessed safely and securely through any Linux OS, do we really need Microsoft OS to access local drives ?It is the human mind that shows the initial fear and reluctance to move to a new free and open source system.

Hence it is my sincere request to the university authorities to use the money thus saved (Institute license for MS may be draining a couple of crores of rupees every year from uty funds) to buy better quality hardware, more Internet bandwidth, 3D printing machines, AI capability and so on.

George.

Toyota facts and Vision, Mission and Carbon neutrality..

Toyota

Vision ( from www.tkmombudsman.com)

• 
  Delight our customers through innovative products, by utilizing advanced technologies and services.
• Ensure growth to become a major player in the Indian auto industry and contribute to the Indian economy by involving all stakeholders.
• Become the most admired and respected company in India by following the Toyota Way.
• Be a core company in global Toyota operations.
  

Mission

• Practice ethics and transparency in all our business operations
• Touch the heart of our customers by providing products and services of superior quality at a competitive price.
• Cultivate a lean and flexible business model throughout the value chain by continuous improvement.
  
• Lead the Toyota global operations for the emerging mass market.
• Create a challenging workplace which promotes sense of pride, ownership, mutual trust and teamwork.
• Create an eco-friendly company in harmony with nature and society.
  

Through these activities establish superior brand image in India

Toyota Kirloskar Motors (TKM) Bidadi has achieved 100% Carbon neutrality  (click here to read Financial Express report) by installing solar panels to run the 8.2 MW plant within the Bidadi plant and 18 MW plant (in the vicinity). 

This is as per the Toyota global commitment to make their plants globally carbon neutral by 2050 (later revised to 2035). It is not Indian govt pressure on Toyota but Toyota's global commitment to the environment that has forced the TKM Bidadi to reduce its Carbon footprint and go for 100% Carbon neutrality. TKM also reduces its water footprint and meets 95% of its water requirements through Rainwater Harvesting and recycling, which is yet another great achievement. Besides Carbon neutrality TKM is also aiming at water neutrality.

It was Kochi international airport in Kerala that had the unique distinction of being the only state run facility in the world to go 100% solar (unsure whether it is 100% Carbon neutral) in 2016, having negative Carbon footprint. Toyota Kirlosakar Motors in Bidadi is closely following the Kochi airport way.

We are visiting Toyota Bidadi plant tomorrow 8 Sept, 2022, and will get to know more about the TKM Ecozone in Bidadi, on what Toyota is doing for environmental sustainability.

George.