The History of the Toyota Production System and Lean

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

Start with the documented problem. Take a power loom. If the weft or warp thread breaks and the machine isn't stopped at once, faults occur and damaged fabric comes out. That small, expensive annoyance, in Japan in the 1890s, is where this history starts.

The Toyota Production System (TPS) took shape inside Toyota from the late 1930s to the 1960s. It was built on two ideas. Jidoka began with Sakichi Toyoda's self-stopping looms in the 1890s. Just-in-Time came from Kiichiro Toyoda, who proposed it when Toyota's Koromo Plant opened in 1938. The word "Lean" came later. John Krafcik used it in a 1988 article, and the 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World carried it to managers around the world.

The throughline is one stubborn question asked in four different decades: how do you make exactly what is needed, when it is needed, without shipping a defect or piling up waste? Toyota's own account of the system gives two pillars, jidoka and Just-in-Time, and every era below adds a tool to one or the other. For the method as it is practiced today, see our guides to lean methodology, just-in-time production and kaizen. This page tells where they came from. The wider story of how managers learned to run organizations is in the history of management.

Timeline at a Glance

The Loom Years (1890s-1930)

Sakichi Toyoda teaches a machine to stop itself

The first era is about textiles, not cars. Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1930) built power looms, and Toyota's account says he was driven by a wish to ease the work of his mother, who wove by hand late into the night. The Toyoda Power Loom, completed in 1897, featured a weft halting device that stopped the machine when the weft thread broke or ran out. Later models added a warp halting device and a system for keeping warp tension constant. Toyoda's own 1905 instruction manual pitched the benefit in plain terms: because the loom stopped itself on a fault, a single operator could handle several looms, and flawed cloth and rework dropped.

Look at what that does. The machine now carries the judgment of when something is wrong, so a person no longer has to stand and watch it. Toyota's history says the design concepts of those halting devices were the origin of jidoka, and that Taiichi Ohno wrote as much in a March 1969 internal newsletter. Toyota's current description is "automation with a human touch," and adds that the ability to stop on a fault means that machines no longer need to be watched.

Keep the precursor and the concept apart. Sakichi Toyoda never wrote a production system, and the word jidoka was applied to his devices decades later. What he left was a principle: stop at the fault, never pass a defect on.

The next step came from his son. Kiichiro Toyoda developed the Type G automatic loom, with a non-stop shuttle change motion, in 1924. Toyota credits him with introducing flow production on a chain conveyor into the assembly line for automatic looms, completed in 1927. The Type G was good enough to sell abroad. On December 21, 1929, in the United Kingdom, Kiichiro signed over the automatic loom patents to Platt, a British loom maker, for a total of 100,000 pounds. On the same trip he spent his time studying the automotive industry, and Toyota's history says he was preoccupied with observing Ford's plants and researching machine tools.

What this means for teams today: The oldest idea in the system is also the cheapest to try. Give people the authority, and the means, to stop work when something is wrong.

Kiichiro's Just-in-Time (1937-1945)

Flow production meets a car with thousands of parts

The turning point was a new company. Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. held its inaugural general meeting on August 27, 1937, spun off from the automotive department of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, with Kiichiro as executive vice president. Its Koromo Plant, first phase completed in November 1938, joined casting, forging, machining, stamping, body assembly, painting and final assembly in one integrated site, with conveyors installed for flow production.

Kiichiro was not the first to move cars along a line. Ford's moving assembly line dates to 1913, and The Henry Ford records that by early 1914 it produced a finished Model T every 93 minutes against 12 and a half hours before. The Lean Enterprise Institute's history says the weakness of Ford's system was not the flow but the lack of variety: essentially every Model T chassis was identical until production ended in 1926. That is the problem Toyota had. The Lean Enterprise Institute says Kiichiro, Ohno and others looked for simple innovations that could give both continuity of flow and a wide variety of products.

Kiichiro's answer, per Toyota's history, was to propose Just-in-Time production when the Koromo Plant opened. Toyota's own page quotes his reasoning: "A complete car cannot be built if even one part is missing." Eiji Toyoda later described the aim as making what is needed in time, "but don't make too much." At first the plant used a preparation office that released only the blanks needed for that day's plan, so each shop built only what the next one needed and stopped when the quantity was done.

Then the war arrived. Toyota's history records that a rationing system for automobile production materials in 1939 made it impossible to get just the necessary materials, and the Just-in-Time initiatives were suspended. The concept had a name and a slogan but no durable mechanism. A management system that dropped transfer slips, the same page notes, took a long time for people to understand.

What this means for teams today: A good idea needs a mechanism. Kiichiro had the principle in the 1930s and still waited until the 1950s for the tool that made it routine.

Ohno's Shop Floor (1945-1973)

Supermarket shelves become the kanban card

The postwar story belongs to Taiichi Ohno. According to the biography on the publisher's page for his book, he joined Toyoda Spinning and Weaving in 1932, moved to Toyota Motor in 1943, became machine shop manager in 1949 and a director in 1954. In that book Ohno recalls that after the war Kiichiro told the company to "catch up with America in three years," and that he remembered a prewar estimate that it took nine Japanese workers to do the job of one American. His conclusion: the Japanese must be wasting something, and removing the waste was the start of the system. Treat that as Ohno's own telling.

Money was the pressure. In 1950 Toyota posted a loss of 76.52 million yen for the four and a half months to March 31, a protracted labor dispute over job cuts followed, and on May 25, 1950, Kiichiro announced he would resign to take responsibility. The memorandum settling the dispute was signed on June 10, with about 1,700 volunteers against a target of 1,600 job cuts and a 10 percent wage cut for the remaining staff.

Training came in from the United States. Training Within Industry (TWI) began as a U.S. wartime program, and the government's own report says the service originated in August 1940. Toyota's own records say Japan's Ministry of Labour introduced it in 1950, and that TWI job relations classes began at Toyota in April 1951 and job instruction in January 1952. Toyota later built its own versions of the courses. TWI is a precursor in how Toyota trained supervisors, not a part of TPS itself.

The mechanism for Just-in-Time arrived in the mid-1950s. Toyota's history says the concept "was not fully realized until 1954 when the 'supermarket method' was proposed," the idea that later processes take what they need from earlier ones, and that the kanban was proposed as the tool. Ohno explains the source in his book: American supermarkets, where a customer takes what is needed, when it is needed, in the amount needed, and the shelf is restocked to match. He writes that he toured U.S. plants in 1956, and that his machine shop had been studying the supermarket idea since the late 1940s. Picture a card traveling back from the later process to the earlier one with an order to replace exactly what was taken.

The rollout was slow and physical. Toyota records that kanban was adopted at all plants in 1963, extended to parts retrieval from suppliers through 1965, and paired with production leveling so that assembly lines and material retrieval ran evenly. Andon boards, lights that call a supervisor to a problem, were installed at the Kamigo Plant in 1966, which Toyota describes as completing "automation with a human touch" on the line. The pull card worked on the Just-in-Time pillar and the andon on the jidoka pillar, and by the late 1960s both were in daily use. Our history of kanban follows the card itself from here into software. The profile of Taiichi Ohno covers the man.

What this means for teams today: The tools came from solving an immediate problem with scarce money. Pull systems, signals and leveled work are cheap to try in any process where one step feeds another.

The Oil Shock (1973-1984)

Zero growth shows which systems bend

Through the 1960s, high growth hid inefficiency in every industry. The break came with the Fourth Arab-Israeli War in October 1973, when Arab countries cut oil production and exports and the posted price of Arabian light crude rose from 2.59 dollars a barrel in January 1973 to 11.65 dollars in January 1974. Toyota's monthly sales fell more than ten points year on year from December 1973, and the company cut production from January to March 1974.

The slowdown showed up a flaw in the system itself. Toyota's history reports that, as jidoka advanced, a fixed number of workers had been assigned to each automated machine, so a drop in demand left staffing that could not shrink. It records that Toyota eliminated fixed staffing so lines could run with fewer workers, with Ohno pushing for "people-saving" in place of "labor-saving." Ohno's book says Toyota's earnings in 1975 to 1977 held up better than other companies' and that this widening gap made outsiders ask what Toyota was doing. He argued that people started paying attention to the system because of its flexibility under changing conditions.

Ohno's book, first published in Japan in May 1978, set the system out in his own words. It appeared in English in 1988 from Productivity Press, with the subtitle Beyond Large-Scale Production.

Meanwhile Toyota carried the system outside Japan. In Australia, Toyota's history says, introducing TPS and QC circle activities helped cut total man-hours per vehicle from 45.2 in 1980 to 27.9 in 1985. That figure is Toyota's own and combines both initiatives. In February 1984 Toyota and General Motors each contributed $100 million to found NUMMI, a 50-50 joint venture using a Fremont, California, plant that GM had recently closed. Toyota's history notes that its production divisions felt uneasy about disclosing production expertise inside a joint venture plant.

What this means for teams today: A system's strengths show in a downturn, not in a boom. Test your own process by asking what happens when volume drops 20 percent.

The Lean Coinage (1984-1996)

MIT researchers give the system an English name

The name came from outside Toyota. John Krafcik, who had worked as an engineer at NUMMI, wrote "Triumph of the Lean Production System" in the Fall 1988 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. Mark Graban's account of the article notes that Krafcik contrasted a "lean" plant, with inventory kept at an absolute minimum so quality problems surface quickly, with a "buffered" plant that hides trouble in stock. He also describes the article as being about management policy, teamwork and culture more than about tools.

Two years later came the book. The Machine That Changed the World, by James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos, was published in 1990 and, per its title page, was based on the MIT five-million-dollar, five-year study of the future of the automobile. The Lean Enterprise Institute says the thought process of lean was thoroughly described in that book. In 1996 Womack and Jones distilled it in Lean Thinking to five principles: specify value from the customer's view, identify the value stream, make the product flow, introduce pull where flow is impossible, and pursue perfection.

Note what changed. "Lean" gave outsiders a portable label for a system Toyota had built over decades. A portable label also invites a tools-only reading: copy the cards and the boards, skip the culture. Graban reads Krafcik's article as arguing the opposite. Lean sits beside the period's other quality movements, total quality management and Six Sigma, and the same decade's rival fashion, business process reengineering.

What this means for teams today: Copy the principles before the tools. A kanban board without the habit of stopping to fix problems is only a board.

Lean Beyond Cars (1996-present)

From the assembly line to hospitals, software and startups

After 1996, lean spread to work that has little to do with cars. The Lean Enterprise Institute lists adaptations to logistics, services, retail, healthcare, construction, maintenance and government. Toyota itself wrote down its values in April 2001 as the Toyota Way 2001, built on two principles, Continuous Improvement and Respect for People, with five concepts: Challenge, Kaizen, Genchi Genbutsu, Respect and Teamwork.

Software was next. In 2003 Mary and Tom Poppendieck's Lean Software Development identified seven lean principles and adapted them for software, and in 2011 Eric Ries's The Lean Startup applied lean manufacturing practices to startups. Both borrowed the vocabulary of waste and flow, and neither is TPS itself. Our article on Lean Six Sigma shows another hybrid, and Toyota Kata describes a routine for the improvement habit.

The system also met a stress test no one planned. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off Japan. Toyota's survey found that 659 supplier sites, including secondary and subsequent suppliers, were damaged, and estimated that the impairment would extend to 1,260 items and affect up to 80 percent of its global production vehicles. Plants in Japan returned to normal operating levels in early July and overseas plants by September, and Toyota credits going to the source to find facts and rapid decisions. Later that year flooding in Thailand cut Toyota's global production by 260,000 vehicles. Lean links suppliers tightly, and tight links need visibility several tiers down.

What this means for teams today: Lean is a habit, not a finished state. Map your dependencies below your direct suppliers before a shock does it for you.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: Toyota Production System and Lean History

• Toyota's description of TPS rests on two pillars, jidoka and Just-in-Time.
• Sakichi Toyoda's 1897 loom stopped itself when a thread broke or ran out.
• Toyota's history says Just-in-Time was proposed at the Koromo Plant, then not fully realized until 1954.
• Kanban was adopted at all Toyota plants in 1963.
• The Henry Ford records a Model T every 93 minutes by early 1914, against 12 and a half hours before.
• John Krafcik's "Triumph of the Lean Production System" appeared in Fall 1988.
• Lean Thinking (1996) set out five principles.

The Pattern Behind the History

We call this the Stop, Link, Pull, Show, Export pattern. It is our reading of the timeline, not a research result.

1. Stop. Sakichi Toyoda's looms halted on a fault, so a defect was caught where it was made.
2. Link. Kiichiro Toyoda tied the steps of a car plant into one flow instead of separate shops.
3. Pull. Ohno's supermarket idea and the kanban card let each step take only what it needed.
4. Show. Andon lights and the 1973 slowdown made hidden problems visible, from machine faults to idle staff.
5. Export. Krafcik's article and the 1990 book turned an internal system into a label other industries could copy.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Let the people closest to the work stop it. That is the oldest idea here, and it dates to 1897.
• Make the next step pull from the last one. Producing ahead of need was Ohno's chief target.
• Keep the principle and the tool separate. Kiichiro's 1930s principle waited about two decades for its tool.
• Test the system in a downturn. The oil shock showed Toyota its own staffing flaw, and the 2011 disasters showed supplier depth.
• Do not mistake the board for the method. Lean was named as a management system, so teach the habits along with the cards.

For the wider story, read the history of management, the management theory timeline and the earlier chapter on scientific management, which measured work long before Toyota redesigned it.

The Toyota Production System began as a weaver's wish to spare his mother a long night at the loom, and it grew into one of the most copied management systems of the twentieth century. The teams that benefit most from it tend to start where Sakichi did: stop the line when something is wrong, and fix it where it happened.