The TWI Service website has one mission: to make available to all people the simple shop floor continuous improvement tools that have been proven to work in any industry, anytime. The website was created and maintained by Bryan Lund.
Past
The TWI Service was the original name of the WWII agency. The purpose of this program was to train supevisors in the three J-programs and then ensure that companies could carry on the programs on their own. This was done through a rigorous quality control program. Unfortunately, the agency was decommissioned at the end of the war, just like all of the ABC agencies created for the sole purpose of ramping up wartime production.
Lowell Mellen, a TWI district representative in Cleveland, founded TWI, Inc. after the decommission and was in business for over 20 years. Mellen's most notable accomplishment, although probably not at the time, was bringing the TWI programs to Japan in 1950 and the Problem Solving Training program in 1956. The original "four horsemen" of TWI: Channing Dooley, Walter Dietz, Mike Kane and Bill Conover founded the TWI Foundation in Summitt, NJ as well. Mellen's group was a private consulting firm, the TWI Foundation was a consortium of member companies. Although we aren't sure how long the foundation existed, it's possible that it was alive and well through the early 1970s.
Bryan was introduced to TWI nearly 40 years after Mellen sold TWI, Inc. to a book publisher. A member of the Vermont SME chapter #204 study group, comprised of lean practioners, they asked a simple question:
"If this lean stuff works so well for Toyota, how do they get it to stick?"
This trio began the tedious task of finding out what it was that you don't see at Toyota that makes it work. A small group of well researched articles by Alan Robinson, Jim Huntzinger, Don Dinero and others convinced us that "maybe there is something to this TWI stuff."
Present
And so, here we are. There have been dozens of articles written about the topic of TWI in the past 4 years. Bryan has been to the National Archives in College Park Maryland twice, digging through the official TWI records, many of them available here. Jeff Maling a member of the SME study group, has found more early 20th century references to continuous improvement, online TWI manuals, the original TWI report and surprises everyone with his pre 1920's lean references all too often. There have been two TWI Summitt conferences and interest continues to build.
...and all of us use TWI everyday as a means to implement lean and change the culture.
Future
The simple fact is this: TWI was a program built on sound industrial engineering principles, and those have been distilled into simple axioms that are aimed at shop floor leaders. We know lean is about culture change and that begins on the front lines of human interaction - where the work is done. We learn this in Job Instruction: "getting each and every person to do the job correctly, multiplied by all the people in the deparment, represents much of the answer to production problems." The question is how do you do this with everyone? TWI presents to us much of that answer.
