Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from the book, Management Lessons From Taiichi Ohno: What Every Leader Can Learn From the Man who Invented the Toyota Production System, by Takehiko Harada (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015).

The phrase, “kaizen equals getting closer to the final process” was hardly used by people at Toyota, which I think is why it stuck in my mind. It seems like a simple phrase, but many people have told me that it is confusing, so I will explain the background to the situation.

When I was around 30 years old, I was working as an engineer in the headquarters machining plant. I was on the No. 3 truck undercarriage line. This line was synchronized with the main assembly line and supplied parts to it. The final process was to do a quality check, and sometimes that took a long time, delaying the delivery of parts to the main line and causing a stoppage. As a result, this problem was interfering with the stability of operations.

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