Comparison of Toyota and Nissan Manufacturing Company

Running head: COMPARISON OF TOYOTA AND NISSAN COMPANY
Comparison of Toyota and Nissan Manufacturing Company
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Introduction
The automobile company was started in France and arose as a contemporary business
through the line of assembly in mass production of the Model-T in 1913 by the establisher of the
Ford Motor Industry, Henry Ford, in the year 1903 (Alagaraja, 2013). In 1908 the General
Motors were established by William Durant, and in 1925, Chrysler was developed (Alagaraja,
2013). The two main automakers in Japan have been based within the same business,
experiencing similar global forces and politico-economic problems globally and domestically.
Even though they have had the same industrial resources like information, work force,
technology, capita and products, major dissimilarities in their monetary performance started to
arise during the 1980s.
This paper’s purpose is to evaluate the factors that subsidized to the performance
difference of the two main automakers, Nissan and Toyota, during the application of the JIT
technique in their manufacturing process. It is discussed that the enactment of the two
corporations can be associated to lean manufacturing to augment productivity, enhance the
quality of the products and the period of manufacturing cycle, lessen inventory, decrease the lead
time and eradicate industrial wastes. To attain the above, the philosophy of lean production
makes use of various concepts like scrap reduction, on-piece flow, work place management,
kaizen, pokayoke standardized working, cellular manufacturing, inventory management and
synchronous manufacturing to lower productivity wastes (Russell and Taylor, 1999). In JIT
manufacturing schemes, trials are made to eradicate wastes via constant process improvement of
the whole value chain within the organization. Having cultivated a mindset of lean
manufacturing among the workers, it helps in the accomplishment of continuous flow of
products through the control and physically rearranged mechanisms. A research illustrates that

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“many of the western producers have been conscious of the necessity to enhance their
competitiveness and performance for about two decades”.
Just-In-Time
Just -in -Time (JIT) manufacturing is a productivity idea which eradicates waste related
with storage space, time, and labor (Alagaraja & Egan, 2013). The concept’s basics are that
Industries produce only the needed products, when they are required and in the quantities that are
needed. The company manufactures what the customer asks for, to real orders and not to
forecasts. Therefore, JIT can be described as the process of creating the essential units, with the
needed quality, in the required quantities during the last harmless moment (Bhasin, 2012).
Therefore, it means a corporation can easily allocate and manage their resources. It means that
company can manage with their own resources and allocate them very easily. Figure 2 indicates
an illustration of the JIT theory.
Source: (Alagaraja, 2013)

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Lean manufacturing or Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing. The innovators of these approaches
were Shigeo Shingo, a renowned consultant and engineer and Taiichi Ohno, a previous executive
and Toyota. In Shigeo’s book of 1989 ‘The Study of the Toyota Production System from an
Industrial Engineering Perspective’, he recognized these elementary aspects of TPS (Bhuiyan,
Baghel, & Wilson, 2005):
1. It accomplishes cost discounts by eradicating waste, be it materials, staff time, or other
assets.
2. It decreases the possibility of over-production by sustaining limited inventories ("non-
stock") and maintains labor charges low by making use of minimal manpower.
3. It drastically cuts on the time of the production cycle with inventions such as the Single-
Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) scheme, which reduces the downtime and allows
small-lot production.
4. It stresses that invention orders should lead the decisions of productivity and processes,
an exercise referred to as order-based invention.
History of Toyota Production System (TPS)
TIS is known for having taught the current automobile industry on how to assemble
proper cars. Few organizations had been aware of the Toyota Production Systems until the
programme ran by the by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about the process
(Bonavia & Marin-Garcia, 2011). The institute also wrote a book in the year 1991, “The
Machine that Changed the World”, the book defined the practices and principles used in lean
production established at Toyota company by executive, Taiichi Ohno. Taiichi in turn had
acquired motivation from W. Edwards Deming, who was an important quality-control expert and