Applied Research Of The Toyota Production System In China

China has become the factory of the world by relying on cheap labor, and used it as an advantage to compete on a global scale. But at present, the market environment is changing because of rising costs of production factors, excess capacity, industrial structure adjustment, environmental degradation and other issues. Combined with increasing competition both internal and external, in order to improve competitiveness, enterprises need to change mass production and take more efficient methods to improve quality and reduce_cost of products. TPS (Toyota Production System) has been approved to be an advanced mode of production, and contemporary enterprises in China would gain a lot by learning it. Unfortunately until now only a handful of enterprises have implemented TPS successfully; furthermore, it has been misinterpreted by a lot of people, In this paper, TPS and its application will be introduced via a case of SFTM (Sichuan FAW Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. a joint venture between Toyota and FAW).The second part of this paper is designed to introduce the concept of TPS. One of the innovative features of this paper is aligning the logical relationship with a variety of tools and concepts in TPS, such as MUD A, JIT, Jidoka, Kanban, and Kaizen and so on. For example, the core of TPS is eliminating MUDA through continuous Kaizen activities to increase productivity and reduce production cost.How to implement TPS? The third part of the paper focuses on the case of SFTM, and examines how the company brought TPS into daily production and applied it to achieved astonishing results, which leads to the steady development of the company over the years.However, the implementation of TPS is a daunting project. The challenges encountered during the process of TPS implementation in SFTM were summarized in the fourth part of this paper, along with the analysis regarding the causes of these challenges. Innovation regarding this part is that the summaries are based on the phases of TPS implementation. It indicates that the reason TPS can be implemented smoothly in SFTM is due to the fact that each challenge encountered during the process has been handled properly by the company.The fifth part of the paper summarized the experience of dealing with the challenges referenced in the previous part by SFTM. Steps and measures taken by the company to deal with these challenges have been illustrated in detail, and this is a vital part and an important innovation of the thesis. More difficulties should be addressed to other enterprises intending to implement TPS.The last part of this paper focused on the inadequacy of TPS implementation in SFTM. There is still a long way to go if TPS can be implemented as successfully as the case at TMC in Japan. In addition, the continual research of this thesis is illustrated in this part. We suggest more Chinese companies and theorists continue to study and apply TPS. In the future, we believe there will be more successful companies due to the learning and implementing of TPS, and they can create their own production system based on the implementation of TPS, furthermore, solid production systems create high value products that can be sold globally, and this in turn is going to make more Chinese enterprises to go abroad, taking the advantage of international competition.