In his book, Toyota Production System (Productivity Press, 1988), the original in Japanese was Toyota Production Method (Diamond Inc., 1978), Taiichi Ohno said:

“The tool used to operate the system is kanban, an idea I got from American supermarkets…. A supermarket is where a customer can get (1) what is needed, (2) at the time needed, (3) in the amount needed… the supermarket is a place where we buy according to need…. From the supermarket we got the idea of viewing the earlier process in a production line as a kind of store.”

This is repeated in Jeffrey Liker’s book The Toyota Way (McGraw-Hill, 2004) and in many other books.

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