Biography | 豊田喜一郎 Kiichiro Toyoda — Just-in-Time Was Proposed Here in 1938, Then Abandoned for Sixteen Years

Just-in-Time is usually credited to Taiichi Ohno and the 1950s. It was proposed on this site in 1938, by the founder, and then the war killed it. Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. held its inaugural general meeting on 27 August 1937 and completed registration the next day. Capital was twelve million yen, nine million paid, and the head office was at Maeyama 8, Shimoichiba, in Koromo town. Kiichiro was not its president. Risaburo Toyoda held that post; Kiichiro was executive vice president and did not take the presidency until 1941. Ground was broken for the Koromo Plant on 29 September 1937. The first phase was finished in November 1938 — half a million square metres of site, two hundred thousand of buildings, forty-five million yen. It was an integrated plant. Casting, forging, machining, stamping, body assembly, painting and final assembly were laid out to connect, which is the part that mattered. Kiichiro's proposal, as operations began, was that each part should be ready exactly when the next process needed it. His argument was about neither shortage nor excess: no waiting for parts to circulate, no surplus labour or time against the day's plan. The mechanism was a Preparation Office sitting between the blank shops and the machine shops. It released only the blanks that day's schedule required, the machine shop passed on finished parts matching what it had received, assembly built that number of vehicles, and a department that hit its figure shut its line. He also proposed running it without transfer slips. That took a long time to be understood, and the Goguchi control system was used instead. Then rationing arrived. From 1939 automotive materials were allocated centrally, which made it impossible to obtain only what was needed, only when it was needed, and the initiative was suspended. Jiro Iwaoka, who ran the Koromo machine shop, recalled Kiichiro using the phrase before production even moved here. The idea was not realised until 1954, with the supermarket method — later processes drawing from earlier ones, kanban as the tool. Sixteen years after it was first put to the men on this floor. This is still Toyota's Honsha plant and a working factory, not somewhere to turn up and look around. The public site for this history is the Kuragaike Memorial Hall, about seven kilometres north-east. Photo: Tokumeigakarinoaoshima, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons — the headquarters at the Honsha site, photographed in 2012.