2015-10-22
603
1. Since Toyota had not got the money to stockpile parts and materials, Mr Ohno evolved the … system by which the products are pulled through the system by market demand, rather than being driven by supply of raw materials. Parts are made only as they needed, and supplied to the next production stage literally just in time. The system is controlled by a series of …, the word for ‘sign’ in Japanese. These are metal tickets or cards which act as an order from a workstation to the one before it, saying make X number of Y parts.
2. The Post Office sent two senior managers to the US to study the collection of management techniques and philosophy now called …. What they found was an influential circle of companies devoted to the principle that doing a job right first time is always cheaper in the long term than doing it approximately and fixing mistakes afterwards, as most firms do. In the fully-fledged … organization, quality is ‘free’.
3. A central tenet of …, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement, is the elimination of waste. It not only exists in obvious piles of excess inventory. It is also wasteful when an operator makes more movements than is necessary to complete a task because his or her machine is badly positioned. Another central theme is the drive to reduce the time wasted in processes that do not add value, like carrying parts or moving from one machine to another. In an average factory only one second is spent adding value – like drilling holes, assembling or packing – for every 1,000 seconds spent not adding value. You have never seen a factory cut this ratio to less than 1:200 but that managers and workers should continuously seek ways to reduce time-wasting effort.
4. … - the practice of comparing business practices between companies – has come of age in the UK. Some … success stories are the stuff of management textbooks. Rover halved its test times after … against Honda. Lucas Industries cut the number of shopfloor grades four-fold following a … exercise against a German plant. British Rail cut the time taken to clean a train to eight minutes after … against British Airways.
Ex.1. Complete the sentences with the words and expressions in the box. There are two expressions you don’t need.
