Decision-making in the lean production model appears as a factor largely unexplored in the literature. The elements that compound the decision-making process appear marginally when discussing other factors such as just-in-time, partnerships with suppliers, product development and quality built into the process. The objective of this research is to explore how the decision process is presented in the model of lean production. It was developed deep interviews with three former executives of the first echelon and middle echelon of the Brazilian subsidiary of Toyota Motor. The interviewed were intentionally chosen and by chance. The results show a set of elements of the lean production model, name in the literature as problem solving processes, arranged in a proper disposition, here recognized as a metadecision, which structure in a peculiar way the decision process of the Toyota's model. The contribution of this article is to make explicit the structure of the metadecision of the lean production model.
Making decision; Lean production system; Metadecision; Lean business; Toyotism
