"How Toyota solved this problem is legendary," he says. "During the 1950s, they had a hood stamping process that had a changeover time of almost three days. It required moving huge, heavy dies that weighed many tons. Like us, the setup times were so long that they needed to use large batch sizes, which prevented them from using one stamping machine to manufacture multiple different car models simultaneously. You can't make one hood for a Prius and then one hood for a Camry if it takes you three days to do the changeovers, right?

"What did they do?" he asks rhetorically. "They closely observed all the steps required to do the changeover, and then put in a series of preparations and improvements that brought the changeover time down to under ten minutes. And that, of course, is where the legendary 'single-minute exchange of die' term comes from