Sustainable Solutions for SCM

History of the Toyota Production System In 1929, the Toyoda family sold the patent for weaving looms to England and decided to produce cars. By 1950, they were studying the production systems in General Motors (GM) and FORD plants in the USA. Because of the market conditions on the Japanese islands, which were totally different from the automotive market in the USA, they had to develop a production system able to efficiently produce small production volumes of different variants of cars. After 40 years, Toyota has developed the Toyota Production System able to produce the same amount of cars with half the number of people and 50% better quality than its main competitors (see Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4 Development of TPS success The success of TPS was not only in the economy and family classes but even among luxury brands, where Toyota Lexus surpassed the traditionally luxury brands like Mercedes, BMW and AUDI in the USA in the late 1990s. In 2008, Toyota became number 1 in terms of volumes sold in the world after 40 years of domination by GM. Seven kinds of waste in logistics Logistics processes are responsible for interactions in the supply chain. However, lean improvements have been focused so far on production added value and waste. Logistics places the same importance on added value and waste. The availability of all resources is an inseparable part of the value-added activities because logistics added value reflects the new reality of the worldwide markets. Flexibility and availability enabling satisfaction of customer wishes do not have such an importance in the past either for producers or for customers [30]. Classical “lean books” describe 7 wastes in production. Nevertheless, 7 wastes in logistics have the same importance [56]. Supply chain activities responsible for flow contain a huge amount of waste during the information flow of the order or the physical flow of the product. The success of the interactions between production chains in the supply chain is critically dependent on the identification of waste in logistics caused by delivering a product before it is needed, delays during manipulation and delivery flow as well as unutilised and unnecessary transportation, motion, inventory, space and errors.

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