BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

Japanese production management system methodologies that contributed to global business in the latter half of the 20 th century can be represented by the traditional Toyota Production System that constitutes the foundation of JIT (Just in time). In recent years, Japanese manufacturers are endeavoring to survive in a competitive market by expanding their global production and achieving worldwide uniform quality and simultaneous new model launches. Given this background, the authors have recognized the necessity for advancement of Japanese production management system methodologies and therefore hereby propose "Advanced TPS".

Manufacturing throughput (Throughput) is known for the amount of time required for a product to pass through a manufacturing process. The concept of throughput is primary oriented toward the reduction of time required by the manufacturing process. However, it cannot be seen the article about the processing capacity improvement in consideration of the work delay, maintenance of facilities and the influence of sequential system aspect each other. So the authors have recognized the operational availability a key indicator in order to evaluate the throughput and proposed a new operational availability model to identify 1) the development of throughput to link the impact from one step to following step and 2) the contribution of each factors and each step for manufacturing process to pinpoint the bottleneck of the throughput. With improvement to these bottlenecks, the business will be successful while minimizing cost.

This involves the systematization of Japanese production management methodologies as a strategic tool for global production. The authors later demonstrated the new production operational availability model of the proposed "Advanced TPS" at the Toyota in the USA (Toyota USA).