The thread

A village woman weaves at night. Her son, Sakichi Toyoda, grows up to build a loom that stops itself when a thread breaks, the first idea in what became the Toyota Production System. Along the way we test the legends against the records, including who really invented the Type G loom. Sources Toyota Motor, 75 Years of Toyota Toyota Industries, Sakichi Toyoda Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, "Sakichi's Aspiration" panel (Japanese) Kanagawa Prefectural Library, Kiichiro Toyoda profile (Japanese) Taizo Ishida's memoir, as quoted in Kasai and Fujii, Nagoya Gakuin University (Japanese) Takahiro Fujimoto, The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota (Oxford University Press, 1999) From Kaizumi Lean comes from Toyota, so most lean training is built around a car plant. Show it to people in a warehouse, a hospital or a job shop, and you often hear the same thing: "We're not a car plant." Kaizumi solves that. It uses AI to build lean training set in your own workplace, adapted to your company and to any department in it, from procurement to production to quality. Each course is a 15 to 20 minute video, in more than 50 languages. Start a free trial and build up to three modules, no credit card needed. Or try more than 30 free lean tools, like a spaghetti diagram and a standardized work chart.