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U.S. MANUFACTURERS ARE AIMING FOR LEAN GAINS USING TWI TECHNIQUES ORIGINALLY DEVELOPED IN THE 1940S.
A training program dating back to World War II is gaining renewed life these days among lean aficionados in the United States. Called Training Within Industry, the program was once widely deployed in the U.S., and is said to have influenced the development of the Toyota Production System. While some companies-like Toyota-never forgot about the program, it largely faded from practice among U.S. manufacturers.
Today, however, Training Within Industry, or TWI, is enjoying something of a resurgence in the U.S. among proponents of lean. Successfully implemented, TWI aims to deliver a better-skilled workforce, improved labor and management relations, productivity improvements and a focus on continuous improvement.
"TWI helps a company or an organization change its culture to that of lean. It doesn't give all the lean answers [but] what it does do is get everyone thinking the same way," says Don Dinero, principal of Round Pond Consulting Service and author of Training Within Industry: The Foundation of Lean. "TWI gets to the fundamentals that allow you to start thinking in a lean way."
The history of Training Within Industry is an interesting one. The U.S. government created the program during World War II to support the war production effort, when millions of civilians needed to be quickly trained to do production jobs as soldiers went off to war. The program was directed at supervisors. While TWI largely faded away in the U.S. following the war and the shutdown of the government program, it was introduced to Japan and took hold at Toyota-as well as other non-U.S. firms-where it became the basis of Toyota's core training. John Shook, senior advisor for the Lean Enterprise Institute, says components of...