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Whereas the Western automotive industry has been developing strongly since the 1980s, Russia has during this period focused primarily on systemic and structural changes. Even though international manufacturers took account of the most recent trends in the automotive sector when creating businesses in Russia, against the backdrop of the starting conditions for creating enterprises and the subsequent crises and changes to plans, they found it impossible to adhere to similar international growth rates.

In 1990 a book was published entitled “The Machine That Changed the World”, based on a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The authors James Womack and Daniel Jones showed the Western world that Toyota significantly exceeded the world’s entire automotive industry in the optimization of production (“Operational excellence”). Mass production invented by Ford had been replaced by important production principles: perfection, flow, time and pull.

Toyota’s so-called Toyota production system became famous. This production system, also known as “lean manufacturing”, is to this day is a production philosophy and gold standard all over the world. All known manufacturers globally have mastered this system and as a result made giant leaps forwards in terms of efficiency.

However, the wave of lean manufacturing only partly reached Russia. First and foremost, this happened through the international companies working in Russia, which often operate at their plants on the basis of lean manufacturing principles, often under constant monitoring. Apart from the notable exception of some extremely promising pilot projects, the approach is met by a certain level of disbelief at purely Russian companies.