Alcoa Inc. Keith Turnbull is executive vice president of the Alcoa Business System and is in charge of implementing ABS throughout Alcoa. He discusses the importance of creating a coherent, understandable system based upon the principles of the Toyota Production System. Here are some of the questions he answered: Have your competitors taken notice of your performance since Alcoa embraced a pull system? How have you gone about adopting lean? Given the size of your processes, how difficult was it for your company to adopt a new production system? Is the Alcoa Production System grounded in the broader ideas of lean manufacturing? How do you deal with basic lean principles such as takt time and 5-S? How different is your operation today than it was when you first started implementing the Toyota Production System? With the Toyota Production System, is there a difficult transition to make between automobiles and aluminum? Does it cost much to do this? How hard is it to use the same machinery and convert it to production on a "pull" basis? Are you pushing the lean concept into your supply base? How specifically do you learn the Toyota Production System? Do you pay Toyota for your training? From your perspective, are there companies that have done the Toyota Production System well in the United States? How has Alcoa managed to save $1.1 billion using TPS? How have you categorized the savings? Do you measure inventory turns? What are your inventory turns? And those are improving? How long before you get the Toyota Production System installed at Alcoa? To view questions from other interviews in Lean Machines, Click Here. Click Here to order a copy of Lean Machines.