BMW's new X6
This is a great article on the newest BMW X series, birthed in Spartanburg, South Carolina. But hey SKI, "What is the throughput connection?"
"Also interesting to note is that the BMW factory, with its polished floors and synchronized ballet of Kuka robots, feels so high-tech, it's almost -- well -- Japanese. Should be, I can tell by the color-coded bins, placards with words like 'One-Piece Flow', and JIT (Just In Time) mentality (whizzing forklifts) that BMW has implemented the industry's gold standard for production efficiency -- aka TPS or Toyota Production System."
As the expression goes, I was not born in South Carolina, but I got here as soon as I could! And learned that Lean (TPS) was already here...
-ski
P.S. The term “lean production,” first used in "The Machine That Changed the World" (Harper Perennial, 1991), was coined by a member of the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was a collective synonym for the Toyota Production System.