Christensen, King, Verlinden & Yang, in "IEEE Spectrum", May 2008
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6179
This article describes the application of the Toyota Production System (TPS) for the automotive industry to semiconductor industry.
The authors of the article cite Spear and Bowen to distill the TPS into four rules:
"
(1) Highly specific activities
(2) Clearly define the transfer of material and information
(3) Keep the pathway for every product and service simple and direct
(4) Detect and solve problems where and when they happen, using the scientific method
"
"Toyota designs work according to a rigorous process to examine the current state of production and generate hypothesis on how to improve it, together with a highly specified expected outcome."
This final statement is one of the reasons why these principles are not easily applied to software engineering. It's difficult to have highly specified outcome without having solved the problem already...
"It's an empirical approach based on iterative experimentation."
Is it worth adapting to software engineering?
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