Sakiichi Toyoda, the son of a carpenter, was born in 1867 when Japan had just started its development. Sakiichi was born in a rural village, where the women worked in manual looms. During his youth, Sakiichi used his carpenter knowledge to modernize the old manual loom which his mother worked with. In 1891 Sakiichi patented his first automatic loom and moved to Tokyo to start a new loom business. In 1893 Sakiichi got married and had a son named Kiichiro, and went back to his home town where he focused on the improvement of his looms. In 1896, he developed a new automatic loom which was able to stop immediately when a defect on the fabric was shown. The immediate success was rapidly recognized by the exporting company Mitsui, which signed a contract to commercialize his looms. The machinery designed by Toyoda costed only ten percent of the ones developed in Germany and a fourth of the French ones.
In 1894 Japan had a war with China. The recession in the country affected the industry and Sakiichi focused again in the improvement of his machinery. But in 1904 the war between Russia and Japan reversed the situation. The demand for cotton increased and along with it the demand of Toyoda’s looms. In 1907, Sakiichi founded the company Toyoda Loom Works with a capital of one million Yens. Three years later, Sakiichi traveled to United States and found a new interest, the automobile. When he was back in Japan, Sakiichi founded Toyoda Spinning and Weaving Co. Ltd and created the basis of Toyota Corporation. In 1929, Toyoda sold its loom rights to the British company Platt Brothers and left his son Kiichiro invest in the automobile industry. Sakiichi died a year later and Kiichiro began with the research and development of internal combustion engines. Two years later he founded the automotive division of Toyota Automatic Loom Works.
Finally in 1937, Kiichiro produced the first prototype of an automobile and established the basis of Toyota Motor Company Ltd. Kiichiro changed the ‘d’ of his last name for a ‘t’ in order to make the pronunciation easier. In Japanese the ‘d’ and the ‘t’ have the same sound and sometimes depending on the word have an inverse sound and this caused confusion.
Sakiichi Toyoda is known as “The King of the Japanese inventors” because of his contributions to the Japanese industrial development, there is no doubt that the most famous concept is the Jidoka one. He received the Imperial Ribbon Prize and the Third Class Merit Order as an acknowledgement to his contributions. In the following years the automobile demand increased significantly, at the same time so did the economic growth of Japan. In 1938 Kiichiro Toyoda built the first big scale production plant, that is known today as the Corporation’s Matrix. In this plant, Toyota used the “Just in Time” production concept: producing only what is needed, at the time that is needed, with the needed quantities to reduce the stock levels and accomplish meaningful cost savings.
The first vehicle in the Japanese firm was a truck, "Toyota G1", and the first sold automobile was a car made in 1935, with the name AA. In 1947, Toyota launched to the market its first small car, the SA model. The car production out of Japan started in 1959 in a small plant in Brasil and continued with a growing net of plants around the world. The Toyota development strategy follows the philosophy of producing in the selling markets. After the 1957 Toyota radiation in the United States, its most important market outside Japan, signed in to establish a solid presence in Europe. The Toyota products reached an international importance during the sixties decade, when great technical and development installations were built in United States, Canada and in the United Kingdom.
At the beginning of the sixties, the company reached an accumulated production of one million units and in 1972, ten million.
The birth of a Brand
On October the 2nd of 1990, TMC presented to the world the new brand symbol-emblem, established on 1989. This emblem symbolized the advanced characteristics and the product reliability and today it is used in all the new Toyota models. Nowadays, Toyota is one of the biggest automobile producer in the world, with a 6,78 million vehicle production and it is estimated that soon it will be number 1 because of its world growth. Toyota has the honor to be considered the most admired automobile company in the world. It is the undisputed leader of the Japanese and Asian market and it is also the best non-American vehicle selling brand in United States, it is also the Japanese leading brand in Europe. Compared to other automotive companies, Toyota possesses the market’s highest capitalization values in a world scale. The Toyota brands head the quality investigations made every year by the sector’s specialized companies.
Apart from making vehicles, Toyota is dedicated to the production and marketing of forklifts, industrial equipment, prefabricated houses and other products.
The “Toyota Production System” is one of the main Toyota’s legacies. It became known as TPS in the 1970’s but it was established much earlier by Taiichi Ohno, Eijy Toyoda and Shigeo Shingo. Based on the Jidoka, Just-in-time and Kaizen principles, the system is a fundamental factor in the inventory and defect reduction and in the Toyota’s plants and its providers, and supports all the operations in the world. The TPS improving emphasis continues, and the value of the brand’s employee commitment is considered an authentic benchmarking by the automotive industry.
At the beginning of the nineties decade, James Womack wrote a book named “The machine that changed the world” where he described a series of tools used to improve the production efficiency, this book became the bible for every manager that wished to introduce the improvement of the fabrication process. This was not something new in the industrial environment. A decade before, a great effort had been made with the same goal, The Just in Time System.
The JAT (Just in time) shares with the Lean philosophy a great variety of tools that today are well known and used by the companies that are looking for the continuous improvement of their process and products, however JAT and Lean have their base in a system developed previously in Japan, The Toyota Production System.
