henry-ford's company and its River Rouge plant were a primary intellectual influence on TPS. Ford pioneered the moving assembly line (1913) and continuous-flow production, demonstrating that dramatic efficiency gains come from flow rather than batch processing. eiji-toyoda visited the Rouge plant in 1950 and studied Ford's methods carefully. taiichi-ohno read Ford's "Today and Tomorrow" (1926) and recognized both the power of flow thinking and the limitations of Ford's system (rigidity, massive scale requirements, inflexible to variety). TPS can be understood as the answer to the question: how do you achieve Ford's flow without Ford's constraints? The irony is that Ford itself lost the flow philosophy after Henry Ford's retirement, replacing it with the batch-and-queue mass production that TPS was designed to overcome.