leantoyota
Toyota Product Development History
Toyota Motor Corporation is often described through the lens of manufacturing, especially the Toyota Production System (TPS). But Toyota’s long-run performance also depends on a set of less-visible, tightly linked systems: product development, production engineering, quality, marketing, finance, and various other critical management systems. This article provides a structured history of Toyota’s product development engineering organization, tracing its evolution from a small automotive group inside a loom manufacturer in the 1930s to today’s mobility-era development structures. Future articles will examine the early loom business, the parallel evolution of production engineering and other disciplines.
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