Taiichi Ohno

Taiichi Ohno joined the Toyoda industrial group in 1932 and moved to Toyota Motor Company in 1943, where he became a production engineer. Building on Kiichiro Toyoda's vision that parts should arrive at the assembly line just in time for their use rather than sit warehoused, and studying both Henry Ford's moving assembly line and the restocking rhythm of American supermarkets, Ohno developed the set of practices that became known as the Toyota Production System, formally adopted company wide in 1962. His approach organized production around eliminating waste in all its forms, a principle later generalized outside Toyota as lean manufacturing. He is often called the father of the Toyota Production System.