The manufacturing principles pioneered by Toyota were also adopted, in varying degrees, by other manufacturers inside Japan and globally. Toyota remained at the vanguard of refining and formalizing these principles into what would eventually be known as the Toyota Production System (TPS). TPS required close coordination across manufacturing processes and helped identify problems that could otherwise go unnoticed in a system with a larger buffer. The system, however, was not risk free. If something disturbed the flow of information or material, it could idle manufacturing stages downstream of the disturbance.