3P – Passport to the Toyota Production System University

At the end of 1996 I was taking part in a kaizen with the Japanese consultant Chiiro Nakao, a disciple of Taiichi Ohno and current vice president of Shin-Gijutsu Consulting. Our group's goal was to improve the performance of a production line, and it had serious doubts about whether it could repeat the other great results of previous kaizens. It seemed the well was running dry. On the afternoon of the second day, Nakao came into our room and began to explain the 3P tool, used by Toyota at those moments when changes in the very nature of processes are needed, in order to remove the obstacles that are rooted on the shop floor and hinder continuous improvement.

Impressed, but at the same time surprised, I asked Nakao why he was only now mentioning that wonderful tool. Following traditional Japanese symbolism, he replied: "You were in kindergarten, moved on to elementary school, then high school; now, with 3P, you can enter University."

In keeping with the traditional Japanese learning process, with everything in its own time, he considered that only from that moment on would we be able to understand and apply 3P in all its fullness.

3P- Production Preparation Process

At the end of this brief but illustrative story, it remains for us to explain what 3P consists of and its passport to "Toyota University." It is the name of a method for designing lean production processes or, simply, for finding solutions to problems in the flow of value creation in production, resulting in a radical innovation of the current state. It creates naturally lean processes, that is, processes that by their nature do not impose limitations on flow or on the pull production system.

The method consists of leading a multidisciplinary group from areas that represent and integrate the needs of the most diverse perspectives on product/process/costs/equipment, with the aim of fully developing processes with lean principles built in.

1) In the first stage, the group designs at least 7 processing alternatives that facilitate the basic elements of the system: continuous flow, pull production and autonomation.

2) The alternative processes are then evaluated against 14 criteria of an advanced lean system. Each process alternative receives a score on each criterion. The three best alternatives, according to the total score given by the group, move on to the simulation stage.

3) In the simulation, which is very different from Western processes that use software or virtual models, the group must get close to the physical world and carry out full-scale simulations. The best process, the one to be chosen, will be the one whose concept was properly simulated and proved closest to fully meeting the system's criteria and which, in addition, performed better than the other simulated process concepts.

Note that we always refer to the lean process concept, that is, we do not define the type of machine before the simulation. The definition of any equipment is a consequence of the concept developed and chosen in the simulation. In fact, before the machine we should be concerned with the position of the product, the relative movements between product and tools, the ways of loading and unloading, the physical agents employed, and the surfaces and characteristics generated.

Defining the machine as the last step in 3P is one of those subtleties of the Toyota System that Womack and Jones helped us unravel with the idea of the right-sized tool, referring not necessarily only to machines but to every kind of solution that should avoid waste, countering the tendency toward the fastest, the newest, the most efficient, by seeking naturally lean processes with the speed and standards that meet demand.

On the other hand, because of the method's broader scope of intervention, some have mistakenly come to understand it as applying only to new products. In fact, 3P applies to any and every system, larger or smaller, whose kaizens run into limitations, or whose obstacles to the system's evolution, the so-called monuments to waste, need to be removed by more radical action: waste-generating machines, processes that restrict flow, systems with low autonomation, low-reliability machines, erratic logistics and, of course, new investments in products or plants.

Limiting the application of 3P to new products means missing the opportunity for a more pronounced evolution of the system. Companies that practice 3P report savings of 30 to 50% in capital investment and 20 to 40% in manufacturing costs.

Competing ideas

In fact, by seeing 3P as a stage in the application of lean, equivalent to "University," Prof. Nakao's metaphor makes us reflect on the method, whose detailed observation reveals a concept we consider a golden rule: competing ideas.

In a Harvard Business Review article at the end of 1999, Spear and Bowen proposed a roadmap with four basic rules for understanding the Toyota System and perceived very well, from a Western perspective, that the Japanese had in effect created a scientific work roadmap based on hypotheses and experiments, with experiment maps designed to reach a desired state. However, according to our 3P University metaphor, this roadmap can become stagnant and confined to experiments based on a single concept of how things should be manufactured, or to a class of machine processes and structures still inherited from the previous paradigm, thus limiting the reach of the improvements proposed by lean. Now, in symbolic language, it is at University that we learn about several theories competing to explain the same phenomenon. It is not only Newton who explains the force of gravity, which physicists today consider merely a useful theory for the macrocosm; in fact, it faces competition from other theories that explain the phenomenon of attraction between bodies with mass: quantum theory and superstring theory.

Analogously, this is how 3P contributes to the scientific nature of lean: a method that seeks competition among ideas, subjected to the scrutiny of evaluation against the production system's criteria. Just as a scientist researches and evaluates several hypotheses, in 3P seven alternatives - at a minimum - are raised and the 3 best are simulated or, put another way, we run experiments whose results will define the best concept, the process and even the product, and finally the machine that can handle the system.

It is this methodological subtlety that brings about an inversion of traditional procedures, so that we first define the concept, the core of the process, then the complete process, the layout, and only at the end do we think about the machine. A machine that will take on the right size for the process. Without waste.

Without a doubt, 3P is an invitation to take off with lean into other spheres of the system without losing the integration of its elements. It is the opportunity to think of other processes, other product designs, other types of machines and, further down the road, other ways of managing the business. Enrollment is open.

Good luck!!!!!!!