ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the components of the house of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement encompasses an attitude that is never satisfied and always striving to find a better way. The expectation is that people will challenge themselves and their peers to reach higher and higher levels of performance. The Toyota Production System model represents a good model of the philosophies of Lean that helped guide Toyota. When starting the Lean journey, normal attrition rates and invoking hiring freezes on new staff or positions can normally mitigate this risk, especially if the company is proactive. Taiichi Ohno, the Toyota executive given the most credit for creating Toyota’s just in time (JIT), records that he found a model for JIT in the American supermarket. Procter & Gamble and supermarkets became almost synonymous in terms of organization. Toyota’s goal is to arrange a production line to ensure that when something goes wrong, the equipment itself detects the error or mistake and stops automatically.
