Name: Manish Maheshwari Class: ENGR 236 Date: 09/29/2011 Semester: Fall 2011

The Machine That Changed the World- Chapter 1 Summary The book The Machine That Changed the World explains the evolution of lean manufacturing practices in the automobile industry.

As the authors put it, the often repeated statement that the world faces a massive overcapacity crisis in automobile production is a misleading. The reality is that the world has an acute shortage of competitive lean-production capacity and a vast glut of uncompetitive mass-production capacity.

The automobile industry has come a long way since the days of craft production. The craft producer used highly skilled workers and simple but flexible tools to make exactly what the consumer asked for one item at

a time. Goods produced by the craft method cost too much for people to afford. Therefore mass production was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century as an alternative to craft production.

Mass-producers began to use narrowly skilled professionals to design products made by unskilled or semiskilled workers tending expensive, single-purpose machines. These churned out standardized products in very high volume. The machinery was expensive and intolerant of disruption. So the mass-producer added many buffers - extra supplies, extra workers, and extra space to ensure smooth production. The consumer got a

cheaper product but at the expense of variety. Moreover, most employees found work boring and dispiriting.

Today, lean producers led by Toyota have emerged as global leaders. The lean producer combines the advantages of craft and mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and the rigidity of the latter. Lean producers employ teams of multi skilled workers at all levels of the organization and use highly flexible, increasingly automated machines to produce volumes of products in enormous variety.

The most striking difference between mass production and lean production lies in their ultimate objectives. Mass-producers set a limited goal for themselves. This translates into an acceptable number of defects, a maximum acceptable level of inventories and a narrow range of standardized products. To do better, they argue, would cost too much or exceed inherent human capabilities.

Lean producers, set their sights explicitly on perfection: continually declining costs, zero defects, zero inventories, and endless product variety. No lean producer may have achieved perfection and none ever will. But the endless quest for perfection, on the part of lean producers, continues to generate surprising results.