Taiichi Ohno: The Lean Manufacturing Hero Who Shaped Modern Software
Superthread founder David discusses his first computer hero, Taiichi Ohno, the man who invented the Toyota Production System and the Kanban method we use today.
My Computing Heroes: Taiichi Ohno
I’m starting a series on my computing and computer science heroes. Some of them may not have even seen a computer, or the computer wasn’t even invented when they were doing their work, but they have been influential in the way we do things in the computer world.
My first hero is a Japanese engineer named Taiichi Ohno. This guy has been so influential to the modern world that none of us can actually imagine how huge he is. He is the guy who invented the Toyota Manufacturing System.
The Efficiency Gap
I properly came across Ohno when I was reading The Machine That Changed the World. The authors researched car factories globally and realized that in Japan, they could deliver cars for half the cost, build them in half the time, in half the space, and with half the defects compared to American companies.
After the war, Japan was devastated and didn’t have the money the Americans had. Henry Ford’s system used separate, massive stamping machines for every part. Ohno realized Japan couldn’t afford that. He invented a way to modify a single stamping machine to switch parts very, very quickly. What took American companies a day, he got down to a minute.
The Invention of Kanban
He then invented the Kanban System, which is basically a ‘pull’ system. We are all familiar with Kanban boards now, we use tools like Trello or Superthread.
What the Kanban system did for Toyota was provide a visual signal that a task can go to the next stage only when the person who is going to do that task is actually available. This changed the world. When people talk about ‘robots taking jobs,’ it’s often actually Lean Manufacturing. Companies have become so efficient and reliable because of the systems Ohno invented.
Common Sense and Lean Production
A few other things Ohno championed that are critical to how we work:
- Treating workers as family: Employees weren’t disposable resources; they were part of the family.
- Early Supplier Involvement: He brought suppliers in early to participate in the design phase.
- System-Led Management: The manager shouldn’t manage the work; the system itself should manage the work. You react in the short term based on how things are going, rather than having an overarching manager trying to do ‘Waterfall.‘
Lean Software
In software, bizarrely enough, we are quite behind. Car companies have been doing this for decades. We only really got a hold of this around 2005 with Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany and later Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup.
Ohno’s work is directly transferable to the software world. He is not very well known, but he has had a huge influence on how we produce products today.
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