JIT Factory Revolution: A Pictorial Guide to Factory Design of the Future

by Hiroyuki Hirano

Here at last is the first-ever encyclopedic picture book of JIT. With 218 pages of photos, drawings, and diagrams, this unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at actual production and assembly plants illustrates exactly how JIT looks and functions. It shows the way each area of a JIT plant is set up and provides hundreds of useful ideas you can implement, including:

218 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1989

Reviews

[Bob Wallner · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this book would rival War and Peace in length.

Hirano decided with this book to let images do the work of describing what was then known as, just-in-time manufacturing, but is better known today as the Toyota Production System or lean manufacturing.

The text does a good job supporting the pictures and giving brief descriptions of the various topics in a JIT system. The book covers everything from 5S to the components of cellular manufacturing to TPM and safety. Where pictures do not adequately show improvement, cartoons have been drawn.

I loved the simplicity of this book in the ease of which you can read it. This book could easily be read on a weekend for a rainy day. To get the full effect spend some time looking at the pictures. Try to understand what the operators are doing and how this could be applied to your facility.

This book was released in English in 1988. Much of the equipment that is pictured is circa 1970s. It was funny seeing these primitive predecessors to today's modern equipment. It was also funny seeing pictures are from companies manufacturing VCRs, rotary dial phones and fax machines. It shows that the products are irrelevant when it comes to improvement. Lean is universal.