About this Website


The TWI Service website has one mission: to make available to all people the simple shop floor continuous improvement skills that have been proven to work in many industries, at anytime during the past 100 years. The website was created and maintained by Bryan Lund.

Past

The TWI Service was the original name of the WWII agency assisting with mobilizing the war production effort. The purpose of this program was to train supervisors in the three J-programs and then ensure that companies could carry on the programs on their own. This was done through a rigorous quality control program. Unfortunately, the agency was decommissioned at the end of the war, just like all of the A-B-C agencies created for the sole purpose of ramping up wartime production.

Lowell Mellen, a TWI district representative in Cleveland, founded TWI, Inc. after the decommission and was in business for over 20 years. Mellen's most notable accomplishment, although probably not at the time, was bringing the TWI programs to Japan in 1950 and the Problem Solving Training program in 1956. The original "four horsemen" of TWI: Channing Dooley, Walter Dietz, Mike Kane and Bill Conover founded the TWI Foundation in Summitt, NJ as well. Mellen's group was a private consulting firm; the TWI Foundation was a consortium of member companies. Although we aren't sure how long the foundation existed, it's possible that it was alive and well through the early 1970s.

The United States was reintroduced to TWI nearly 40 years after Mellen sold TWI, Inc. to a book publisher. This after several decades of struggling to understand the now famous Toyota Production System and its derivatives, namely, Lean Manufacturing. The Vermont Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) chapter #204 study group, comprised of lean practioners, asked a simple question:

"We can't get this Lean stuff to 'stick.' How does Toyota do it?"

The study group began the tedious task of finding out what it was that you don't see at Toyota that makes it really work. A small group of well researched articles by Alan Robinson, Jim Huntzinger, Don Dinero and others convinced the group that "maybe there is something to this TWI stuff."

Interestingly, the anti-climatic revelation is that TWI and Lean is actually nothing new. Much of it started with Henry Ford, Charles Sorensen, Frederick Taylor, Walter Dietz, Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, Channing Dooley, Allan Mogensen, and many names most members of industry have never heard of. These people proved over and over again that there are no silver bullets when it comes to business of improvement. It is likely that the creators of the closest relative of a lean management system, the Toyota Production System, will tell you that after 65 years that they are only beginning.

Present

And so, here we are. There have been dozens of articles written about the topic of TWI in the past 5 years. Bryan Lund has made several trips to National Archives in College Park Maryland, digging through the official TWI records, many of them available here at this website. Jeff Maling a member of the SME study group, has found more early 20th century references to continuous improvement, online TWI manuals, the original TWI report and surprises everyone with his pre 1920's lean references all too often. Mark Warren has researched the British archives, the U.S. National Archives and conducted extensive research that uncovers many reasons of why TWI faded away, most of them contrary to conventional wisdom. Most revealing about Mark's research is that the reasons for TWI's 'demise' in western management have striking parallels to reasons why Lean fails today. In addtion to all of this research and understanding, there have been three TWI Summit conferences and national interest continues to build.

...and all of us use TWI everyday as a means to create stability and change the culture.

Trends

One has to worry about where TWI is heading. Is this program just another tool for the Lean Consultant's toolbox? Is Job Instruction, for example, the key to making Standard Work stick? On one hand, we can say that it does help Standard Work be more meaningful, but on the other hand, that is not the only benefit we realize from developing peoples' ability in the skill of instruction. The main reason we do train people in JI is because it builds up their ability to think critically. Critical thinking can then lead to more advancements in the workplace, such as Standard Work, Work cells, JIT, Jidoka and SMED for example. But until people think critically, which is a requirement for all other Lean countermeasures, you are almost guaranteed to spin your organizational wheels. So, what is the trend? Frankly, companies are buying session time and hoping that JI works some magic in the way that it transformed Toyota. The fact of the matter is, it took many years of messy progress, taking two steps forward and one back, for Toyota to figure out the stability and structure required to change the culture. This starts with management, not by training your shop floor people in 10 hour sessions. Sadly, the trend for TWI will go in the "toolbox" direction and away from the much needed, management development.

Future

The simple fact is this: TWI was a program built on sound engineering and human relations principles, and those have been distilled into simple principles and concepts that are aimed directly at the task of developing leaders. We now know lean is less about tools and more about culture change; but the change begins by putting the structure in place and instructing management first. The future of TWI is not to treat it as another Lean tool, but to use TWI as means to develop the culture. We learn this in Job Instruction: "getting each and every person to do the job correctly, multiplied by all the people in the deparment, represents much of the answer to production problems."


TWI Materials

TWI & Lean

Thank You

Feel at ease browsing the original materials. Subscribe and collaborate at the TWI blog. Learn and share the wonders of this program. Have fun, and contact us with comments and suggestions!

Fair Use & You

TWI Service considers the wartime manuals available at this site within the public domain and free to download and use according to Fair Use and current copyright law.