The following work describes the way in which the productive systems, from what we could call the modern era, have evolved over the years, this as a result of changes in society and technological development. Undoubtedly, the current requirements are not the same as years ago, which is why it has been essential for organizations to acquire new ways of managing their processes, only those systems that are capable of responding to current market needs will remain in force.
Evolution of production systems
1. From artisanal to industrial production
Until the middle of the 18th century it was the artisan workshops that produced a large part of the goods consumed in Europe. In these workshops, artisans controlled the production process. Frequently in the workshops a group of artisans were dedicated to the production of a merchandise from its beginning to its end, that is, they made the merchandise in its entirety, there was no deep division of labor, and it was they who established, for example, the working days. Artisans produced only one item without anyone intervening, so they knew the entirety of their product, the practical basis for doing so, and sold it directly to their consumers; the product was usually displayed through a window.
The workshops were organized in such a way that each one had a teacher and several apprentices, when the apprentice mastered the use of all the tools, learned the technique and knew the secrets of his trade, they became a teacher and could establish their own workshop.
However, it is in the second half of the 18th century, with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, when the expansion and professionalization of the production of consumer goods, as well as the direction of these operations, took off. The Industrial Revolution was divided into two stages: the first from the year 1750 until 1840, approximately.
With the first Industrial Revolution, the economy based on manual labor was replaced by another dominated by industry and manufacturing. This first revolution was characterized by a change in artisan-type work instruments by new machines. This change occurs because even though the rudimentary instruments used by the artisans fulfilled the objective for which they were created; These, being handled by workers with limited strength and speed, also limited production. This type of manufacturing was not sufficient for the required demand of that time. This is how a new actor is required: the machine. With the arrival of these new technologies factories appeared where all modern machines became the property of a capitalist.
One of the most important technological innovations was the steam engine, powered by coal energy. The production and development of new models of machinery favored huge increases in production capacity. Artisanal production could not compete with industrial production, and thus the artisanal era was ruined. The ancient artisans then had to become wage laborers to survive, thereafter they would be controlled by the industrial capitalist.
2. Series production
After the first phase of industrialization, a new stage began, the Second Industrial Revolution, which was to last from 1880 to 1914. This stage involves the development of industries such as electricity, oil and steel. This is due to the substitution of iron for steel in industry and the replacement of steam by electricity and oil derivatives as an energy source. With the use of oil, there is the introduction of the internal combustion engine, which would lead to the commercialization of the automobile, and with it the mass production of consumer goods.
With the complexity of the new production processes, in this second phase of industrialization, the need for new organizational systems arose. At this time the division of labor and its specialization are accentuated. Science comes to industry. It is then, when Frederic W. Taylor (1856 - 1915) appears on the scene.
Taylor, an American engineer and economist, believed that operations management should be approached as a science. At that time, there were no clear concepts about the responsibilities of workers and management. Virtually no effective working standards existed and workers worked at a deliberately slow pace. Administrative decisions were made "on the fly" based on intuition. Workers were placed in jobs with little or no care to match their skills and abilities with the tasks that they would be required to perform.
The purpose of Taylor was to provide a scientific basis, based on the observation of processes and the measurement and analysis of them; in order to establish the best way to carry out the work, and once the methods were determined, they had to be standardized so that they were fulfilled by all the workers. With this he intended to end the empiricism and improvisation that prevailed at that time.
Taylor's goal was to maximize the efficiency of labor and machines and tools, through the systematic division of tasks (which involved decomposing the production process into as few tasks as possible), the rational organization of work in its sequences and processes, and the timing of operations, plus a motivation system by paying performance bonuses, eliminating all improvisation in industrial activity.
Based on his studies, Taylor conceives the theoretical foundations of the assembly line, a form of organization of production that delegates to each worker a specific function. It consists of a continuous conveyor belt through which the products in the manufacturing phase circulate, and where each worker would dedicate himself to a specific stage of production. Although the theoretical idea was born with Taylor it did not become reality, until years later, when it was applied with great success by Henry Ford, for the manufacture of automobiles.
Henry Ford being a young entrepreneur but already a major shareholder in the Ford Motor Company, he was trying to design a car that was easy to produce and easy to repair. Finally, after several attempts, in 1908 the T model was manufactured, which was a very cheap vehicle that, unlike the cars produced up to that moment, was within the reach of the average North American.
Until then, the car had been a high-cost, handcrafted object for a very limited audience, only the wealthy could buy cars. In 1900, if someone wanted a car, they should visit a factory of the artisan producers in their area. The factory owner, usually a master craftsman (entrepreneur) who knew how to repair and build a car, took the customer's specifications and needs. Many months later, the client had his car, but he needed to test it accompanied by a mechanic, who had to modify it according to the instructions it gave him. The car was unique in its kind and the cost was too high (Villaseñor Contreras & Galindo Cota, 2009).
Ford's project was to make simple, inexpensive cars for the mass consumption of the average American family. Ford aspired that the car would cease to be the exclusive heritage of the wealthy classes and become an object of general consumption, within the reach of the middle classes.
Over the next five years, Ford searched for a better way to build the Model T; I was looking for more speed, cost reduction and greater efficiency. Thus, in 1913, taking to the extreme the recommendations of Taylor's scientific organization of work, Ford introduced mobile assembly tapes in its plants, which allowed a huge increase in production.
This method consisted of installing an assembly line based on drive belts and sliding guides that automatically moved the car's chassis to the workers' positions, located on the sides of the belt, when the belt stopped, the Workers who were in that place carried out the assigned tasks, until the car was completely finished. Chain manufacturing saved labor time losses by not having to move workers from one place to another in the factory. At the same time, the company's management acquired strict control over the work rate of the workers, regulated by the speed that was printed on the assembly line.
Each operation was divided into a succession of mechanical and repetitive tasks, since complex tasks are simplified into several simple operations that can be carried out by any worker without the need for skilled labor, which means that technical or craft qualifications are no longer valuable. of workers, and nascent industry could make better use of unskilled labor.
In series production, the machine becomes the main protagonist of the production process, displacing the worker. This aspect marks a fundamental difference between artisanal production, where the worker plays an active and creative role at work, and serial production where this becomes one more piece of the enormous industrial complex.
With the implementation of a chain-mounting method, the manufacture of a car at a low price and for a wide market was made possible. The success was resounding, this innovative method, which allowed optimizing time and resources. The total production time of the car was reduced considerably, and many cars could be manufactured in a short time. The price of the Ford Model T went from $ 850 in 1908 to less than $ 300 by 1920.
3. Birth of flexible production
At the end of the first two decades of the 20th century, Ford (based on the way of production and organization of work defined by Taylor) managed to change the production systems in such a way that they managed to significantly influence the economic system.
Series production created the conditions for the development of mass consumption, but for this system to provide satisfactory results certain conditions had to be met, the main one being that high levels of demand were maintained, allowing the growing stocks to be disposed of. In other words, mass production required mass consumption, therefore a logical question arose: who would be the mass consumers? To which Ford replied: the employees. So, for production to have an outlet in the markets, it was necessary to simultaneously increase the purchasing power of employees.
This was possible thanks to the high benefits that the new production system guaranteed. This allowed increased productivity and reduced costs, which consequently allowed Ford to raise the wages it offered to its workers far above what was normal in the American industry of the time. Thanks to the high wages they received, Ford workers entered the threshold of the middle classes, becoming potential consumers of products such as the cars Ford sold. In this way, workers were allowed to increase their consumption levels, which finally made it possible to exit their own production as long as low prices and sufficiently high nominal wages were kept. It was about doing, as Ford said,that the workers were the consumers of the products they manufactured.
Until then, the growth rate of demand had been continuous and predictable, however, in the last years of the 1960s, a series of social and economic factors appeared that modified the characteristics of demand, leading to large Fordist industries in deep crisis, thus revealing the fragility of the system.
Ironically, the continued growth of consumption, an aspect that enabled the development and expansion of the Fordist model, also caused its exhaustion. As the purchasing power of the salaried classes increased, their consumption also increased, which in turn stimulated the opening of new horizons to production.
This dynamic requires continually creating "new needs" as a way to maintain a high level of activity and, consequently, profit. This process leads to an enormous diversification of production, so that the realization of infinity of variations on the same product must be generalized, in order to create the illusion of consuming new goods without them actually becoming so.
However, the Fordist production system is based on the manufacture of a large quantity of the same product and at one time. In fact, it transformed the demand for goods similar to each other into the demand for a single standard product. As Ford said before the release of the Ford T model "every customer can have the car in the color they prefer as long as they prefer black."
Logically, a system of this nature would be overwhelmed by the need to diversify production due to the new demands of consumption. But not only is there the inability to respond to a demand whose segments are increasingly diverse, but the system also presents a limit derived from the progressive saturation of the markets.
This is how the model that had worked for a long time reached its limits, due to its inflexibility before the plurality of demand, plurality derived from the saturation of the markets for standardized goods. It was then necessary to redefine the model.
The new competition model required increasing the variety of supply in each market segment, improving quality and continuously introducing new products to the market, so as to induce the development of an adequate demand for substitution that guaranteed the possibility of maintaining high production levels.
4. Toyota Production System
At the end of the 1940s, the Japanese were experiencing great difficulties, their industry and economy were in a period of post-war crisis and in order to get ahead it was necessary to adapt to a new productive system. After the war, Japan was totally destroyed, and the only thing they had left was to make the most of the few resources they had, for this reason they began to worry about designing industrial practices that would help them develop their companies, working in the manner as efficient as possible, and thereby rebuild its economy.
At that time a German worker produced three times more than a Japanese and an American three times more than the German, therefore the North Americans produced approximately nine times more than a Japanese worker; on average, nine Japanese were needed to do the job of an American (Ohno, 1988).
Japanese companies were faced with a challenge, as a response to this, a production management system was developed in the automotive company Toyota, according to the new requirements, which is currently known as the Toyota production system. The development of the system is primarily attributed to three people: Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kiichiro, and engineer Taiichi Ohno.
August 15, 1945 was the day that Japan lost the war, likewise, this date marked the beginning of a new stage for the Toyota Motor company. Kiichiro Toyoda (1894-1952), then president of the company said: "Reach America in three years, otherwise the Japanese automobile industry will not survive" (Ohno, 1988). The goal was clear: to improve Toyota's manufacturing process to match that of Ford's productivity, however, under the mass production paradigms of those days, that was almost impossible for the small Toyota.
The Americans were confident with large-scale production, as synonymous with maximum efficiency. However, such methods did not fit in Japan where resources were scarce and demand was much lower. Toyota did not have the capacity to assemble that number of cars or a market equal to that of the United States to have an assembly line like Ford's, but without a doubt, they were determined to use the original idea of Ford, they needed to adapt This manufacturing process to its own processes to achieve high quality, low costs, short delivery times and flexibility.
This led Taiichi to use observation, imagination and common sense. This is how he found that the basis from which he could achieve greater efficiency lay in the absolute elimination of losses, which are: excessive use of resources for production., excess production, excess stocks and unnecessary capital investment.
The Toyota production system is a rational manufacturing method whose purpose is to increase productivity, completely eliminating unnecessary elements in order to reduce costs. Its basic idea is to obtain the required type of units in time and in the quantity required. The implementation of this idea manages to eliminate unnecessary stocks of products in the process of being manufactured and finished products (Monden, 1993).
Although the system was born during the long period of growth that followed the Second World War, it would not reach its peak until the decade of the 1960s. In late 1973, after the first oil crisis, this production system attracted the attention of Japanese industries. Faced with the impact of unprecedented cost inflation, most Japanese companies had fallen in the red, except for Toyota, which was showing broad profits. It became clear that, to overcome this oil crisis, companies had to reconvert (Monden, 1993).
The new production system introduced a new conceptualization that was adjusted to the resources and possibilities of the Japanese plants, which was far from the system that was being used by Ford. They began to think not of the production of large volumes, but of small ones, not the standardization and uniformity of the product but its difference, its variety. Shingo claims that the basic differences that distinguish this system from Ford's are: small production batches and model mix production.
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