Managing the IE (Industrial Engineering) Mindset: A quantitative investigation of Toyota’s practical thinking shared among employees

Abstract

Purpose: The goal of this work was to investigate the managerial practices of today to understand if Toyota is sheltering themselves from these newer practices or embracing them like most believe.Design/methodology/approach: This work utilizes a new form of data mining named Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to analyze an organizations ideal management practices.Findings: This work shows quantitatively that TPS favors earlier versions of industrial engineering compared to the optimization techniques available today.Originality/value: The use of data mining to analyze organizational management practices.

Keywords

• Toyota Production System (TPS)
• industrial engineering
• lean manufacturing
• dimensional reduction algorithm
• management
• scientific management