A3 - Toyota’s way of solving problems and creating plans

I work for a company that models their a3 process on the Toyota process. Essentially the A3 is used as a structured method of problem definition, requirment planning, and solution implementation tracking within the business. A3 originally refers to the size of paper that the analysis was performed on. A pretty basic and typical outline of an A3 process can be found here (http://www.coe.montana.edu/IE/faculty/sobek/A3/steps.htm ). To my understanding, originally the A3 process was done with paper and pencil, and the A3 updated as conditions or understanding of the problem changed. The size of the paper (16.5" × 23.4") allowed for a fairly deep analysis of the problem. A3s can be used for anything from analysis of a single failure, all the way up to planning at the business level, with cascading A3s below being referenced by higher level a3s to drive specific actions all the way to the implementation level.

In practice the deep analysis of an A3 tends to be squeezed onto a single powerpoint slide (which makes Mr. Tufte cry) and much of the problem solving and communicative power of the A3 is lost.

Sloan Management Review Summer 2009 edition had an article about it, I cannot find it online for free though. Their url is http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2009/summer...

If you are a student, use your university's network to access it through something like Business Source Elite or walk to the library and read the actual journal, it's a good read anyway! You can also ask someone with access to these resources to download the pdf for you.