Do you know the concept of “lean manufacturing”? This is the kind of knowledge I had to learn in high school during my economics lessons. The main idea of this concept is to base the company’s production on the market demand. That was the principal purpose of TPS – Toyota Production System -. Originally called “just-in-time production”, this philosophy recommends to manage a company according different principles such as:
- Elimination of waste
- High level of quality in the manufacturing process
- Avoiding an excess supply
- Taking into account employees’ opinions and feedbacks
- Continual improvement of the production system
This outlook was implemented at Toyota in 1962. It worked quite well for them. That is why many companies get inspired by Toyota.
Who thought about it?
Taiichi Ohno is the father of those ideas. He was a Japanese industrial engineer and a businessman. When he was hired at Toyota, he first dealt with the supervision of a shop-floor. Thereafter, he rose to the top and became an executive.
In 1945, Kiichiro Toyoda, the president of Toyota, aimed to improve the production system in order to rise to the same level as the United States. It was a matter of life or death for the Japanese automobile industry! In the fifties, Taiichi Ohno thought about the just-in-time method to reach this goal. Toyota took it on in the early sixties. Yet it couldn’t be applied immediately because of workers. This approach required them to be multipurpose and they were reluctant to that idea.
What was the real strength of Toyota?
The “just-in-time” concept was quite astounding. Yet, Toyota held other cards. Another of its strengths was its ability to provide customized products in a short time. How could they make it? Toyota engineers elaborated universal and adaptable machines. Workers could easily change pieces of them. They still used the same production engine but some of the parts could be modified to correspond to another product design. That is how Toyota’s products made the difference from the one of the mass production.
What is the link between Toyota and Atemis?
During his studies, Benoit Barrier, AtemisCloud founder, worked by 1994 on a Master Thesis about Quality Certification in French Industries. All quality concepts such as Kanban, 6 sygmas, Lean & Agile managements inspired Atemis teams from the creation for the customized web-based ERP in 1998. At that time, everyone told Benoit that it was completely crazy to develop such ERP on the web and it will never work. As Bill Gates explained by 1998 in "Work at the speed of brain", it takes 10 years before an innovation is used largely by the public. It took time, energy, perseverance and it worked.
From its architecture, the AtemisCloud solution is the same application for all customers (Multi-instances). Yet, it is fully adaptable to numerous and divers needs. How? There is one database by customer (Multi-tenants) and all the Intelligence is stored in the database. You select the options you want among the 58 modules and 450 features AtemisCloud offers. You can start with few modules. Then, according to the growth of your business, you extend the modules that you need. The solution is fully customized online by our or your teams.
The employees using the ERP in a company have different needs. The salespersons would rather have a summary of their calls during the week, whereas Project manager would like to know the advancement of their team in the steps of a project. Both of them have the same dashboard framework with the same features. However, they choose different type of KPIs appearing on their dashboard. They add and remove the indicators according to their wishes. Because each customer is unique, AtemisCloud solution for one company is unique.
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