0:03 Toyota knows how to make cars. It does it so well it became the first company to produce more than 10 million a year. Its success is rooted in a special system and began what is now known as ‘Lean Manufacturing’, an ethos emulated by companies around the world to make products faster, cheaper and better. Following the Second World War, Japan was left in a precarious economic position.

0:35 "Steel and other metals are scarce" Already disadvantaged by lacking natural resources, materials were hard to come by and companies had to be creative to compete. Toyota’s founder Sakichi Toyoda had started a loom business, but it was his son Kiichiro who founded the motor company in 1937. They were used to working within narrow margins - as the shortage of materials increased during the war, the number of headlamps on its Model K truck was reduced to one and it only had brakes on one of the axles.

1:06 The turning point for Toyota's Production System would come in the early fifties, when Kiichiro's cousin Eiji would travel to the U.S. with a veteran loom machinist, Taiichi Ohno. They visited Ford's River Rouge plant in Michigan and were impressed by the scale of the operation, but knew that in cash-strapped Japan companies didn’t have the resources for such a system; Having months’ worth of stock sitting in a warehouse would tie up precious capital they didn’t have. Instead, what truly impressed Ohno was a visit to a supermarket, a Piggly Wiggly, according