Book Excerpts - The Machine That Changed The World
The book "The Machine That Changed The World" by Womack, Jones & Roos is result of an MIT study which probed into "why Japanese car makers (read Toyota) made strides into American market debasing the vanguards of auto world". Initially the American auto industry blamed the lower wages of Japan to be the main reason of better profit margins for the Japanese firms, but it wasn't always the case. This book is a 300 page case study of auto industry of late 1980's and early 1990's. It studied,defined and demystified the production system that world now knows by the name "lean". The importance of this feat lies in the fact that the look and feel of "mass production" with "lean production" is not much different outwardly. It took a lot of disciplined research on part of this team to figure out and call out this idea of lean production. This post is just collection of sentences from the book, with comments added here and