Toyotaism and the broadcast industry

Perhaps I need to get out more, but the whole idea of Toyotaism and Just in Time manufacture really rather fascinates me. So I did some digging and I wrote this up for a client.

Here’s an excerpt:

The growth of cloud-based models in broadcasting means the industry can start to benefit from advances made in manufacturing and start to design a digital media supply chain fit for the 21st century. For a system so rooted in precision, the exact origins of what has become known as Just-in-Time manufacturing or the Toyota Production System, are impressively murky. Some attribute it to the founder of the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, Sakichi Toyoda; others to his son, Kiichiro Toyoda, who took the company into automotive manufacturing; yet others to company executive, Taiichi Ohno, who further refined the principles. American supermarkets may, or may not, have served as inspiration, as may have a Lockheed plant assembling jet bombers. Either way, it works, and helped establish Toyota as a global manufacturing giant from the 1980s on.

And, perhaps more importantly for the broadcast industry, the move towards digital workflows and cloud-based production means that some of the techniques pioneered by Toyota and large-large-scale physical manufacturing in the latter part of the 20th century can be applied to content supply chains in the 21st.

Read the full thing here: Reinventing the Digital Media Supply Chain