Monthly Archive for March, 2009

In a traditional auto company, it is difficult to pin down where the real responsibility for a new vehicle development program lies. Many departments and many executives have partial responsibility. If you want to find who has responsibility for a new vehicle development program at Toyota, find the chief engineer (CE), because the buck stops [...]

Shotaro Kamiya was to Toyota Motor Sales what Ohno was to the Toyota Production System. His leadership defined the sales philosophy of Toyota. Like most Toyota leaders, Kamiya could be described as a self-made man. Unlike most Toyota employees today, who are hired directly out of school, he joined Toyota as sales manager in 1935, [...]

Given that the Toyota Way is to make decisions slowly, thoroughly considering alternatives (see Make Decisions Slowly by Consensus,Thoroughly Considering All Options; Implement Rapidly (Nemawashi) on nemawashi), it was not surprising that Toyota took a very long time to establish NUMMI, its first American plant, and then took its time setting up Toyota, Georgetown. While [...]

Even when Toyota promoted someone from an unusual part of the company to save it from impending doom, there has never been a sudden change of direction. Perhaps this is the concept of eliminating muri (unevenness) at work at the executive level. It seems that, throughout Toyota’s history, key leaders have been found within the [...]

In industry today, the watchword is flexibility. Everyone wants to be as flexible as possible and Toyota is no exception. Originally, what allowed Toyota to compete with global players was its flexibility. To Toyota, flexibility does not mean pushing the latest and greatest technology onto operations and struggling to make it work. Toyota follows Toyota [...]

In the early 1980s, the trend among automakers was to develop their own internal computer-aided design (CAD) system for designing parts on a computer rather than on paper blueprints. Toyota did this like everyone else, but in a way that preserved and embodied the Toyota problem-solving philosophy. The designers of the new CAD system asked, [...]

I accompanied the University of Michigan’s Dean of Engineering on a trip to Japan some years ago and one of our hosts was Mikio Kitano, who at that time was overseeing the Motomachi complex—Toyota’s largest industrial complex. My Dean was asking a lot of questions about the use of information technology at Toyota. Kitano seemed [...]

When I teach about Toyota’s system, I start with the basics including kanban, which is mainly a manual visual process. If there is an information technology specialist in the house, he or she inevitably asks the question, “Isn’t there any place for information technology in the Toyota Production System?” I reassure them that they are [...]

At Toyota, new technology is introduced only after it is proven out through direct experimentation with the involvement of a broad cross-section of people. This does not exclude new or cutting-edge technology. It means the technology has been thoroughly evaluated and tested to ensure it provides added value. Before adopting new technology, Toyota will go [...]

In today’s world of computers, information technology, and automation, one of the goals is to make the office and factory paperless. You can now use computers, the Internet, and the corporate intranet to call up large storehouses of data, both written and visual, at lightning speed and share it via various software and e-mail. As [...]

When I interviewed David Baxter, vice president at the Toyota Technical Center, he was a bit nervous about a report he was working on. It was the proposed budget for the entire center. The whole time he talked about the report, I was envisioning a large article-like document. Suddenly it dawned on me that he [...]

I have spent a lot of time at the Toyota Technical Center in Michigan, where they engineer vehicles like Camry and Avalon. For much of this time, Kunihiko (“Mike”) Masaki was the president there. Masaki had worked in many different engineering and manufacturing organizations during his career at Toyota, all using excellent visual controls, so [...]

Automakers in the U.S., as well as Japan, are required by law to keep service parts for vehicles for at least 10 years after they stop making the vehicles. This adds up to having millions of different parts available. Toyota’s goal is to have them available just in time, as its manufacturing philosophy preaches. Hebron, [...]

Visual control is any communication device used in the work environment that tells us at a glance how work should be done and whether it is deviating from the standard. It helps employees who want to do a good job see immediately how they are doing. It might show where items belong, how many items [...]

When Americans were making pilgrimages to Japanese plants in the 1970s and ’80s, the first reaction was invariably “The factories were so clean you could eat off of the floor.” For the Japanese this was simply a matter of pride. Why would you want to live in a pigpen? But their efforts go beyond making [...]

Mr. Ohno was passionate about TPS. He said you must clean up everything so you can see problems. He would complain if he could not look and see and tell if there is a problem. —Fujio Cho, President, Toyota Motor Corporation If you walked into most manufacturing plants outside Japan in the 1980s, you would [...]

The critical task when implementing standardization is to find that balance between providing employees with rigid procedures to follow and providing the freedom to innovate and be creative to meet challenging targets consistently for cost, quality, and delivery. The key to achieving this balance lies in the way people write standards as well as who [...]

The Toyota Way of handling the chaos of getting an army of people involved in creating and launching a new vehicle is to standardize the work in a balanced way that doesn’t give complete control to any group of employees. Having only engineers devise the standards would be a form of Taylorism. On the other [...]

Under Taylor’s (1947) scientific management, workers were viewed as machines who needed to be made as efficient as possible through the manipulations of industrial engineers and autocratic managers. The process consisted of the following: Scientifically determining the one best way of doing the job. Scientifically developing the one best way to train someone to do [...]

Toyota’s standards have a much broader role than making shop floor workers’ tasks repeatable and efficient. The Toyota Way results in standardized tasks throughout the company’s white-collar work processes, such as engineering. Everyone in the company is aware of and practices standardization. For example, an engineer can walk into any Toyota factory in the world [...]