Interesting article, enjoyed the read.
The general trend one can establish from most markets, is that the consumer(demand) wants more for less, whether it is physical or whether value adding.
As I mentioned first up, enjoyed the read and also found the last paragraphs quite interesting, where how the management accountant can assist was highlighted in summary.

Enjoyed reading this article and it's highly relevant to my role.

My employer is a manufacturer / repairer of products in a very competitive industry that utilises tenders in order to drive down costs.  So there is constant pressure on prices and therefore costs meaning we have to challenge manufacturing productivity and balance bulk purchases to drive low costs with stock holding.

Furthermore we have a product innovation team and a key part of my role is modelling investment requests to ensure an adequate return will be realised.  These models always include a P&L and cashflow so profitability, payback, NPV and IRR can all be taken into consideration.  This also leads to wider business discussions about resource, and whether we're reacting quickly enough to the market (one recent example has us 6 months behind the market as of right now, with us needing 12 months to develop a competing product - the reason for this delayed response being a lack of resource which has arisen due to cost cutting to stay lean in a challenging business climate).

All of these considerations have to be balanced, whilst learning from the Toyota experience so as to not cut costs to the point that you can no longer keep up with growth and the need to continually innovate.