Monthly Archive for March, 2009
A story I heard from a plant manager at Reiter Automotive (supplier of sound-dampening materials) helped put into perspective what it takes to build in quality. He ran a plant that makes sound-dampening materials in Chicago and supplied them to Toyota. He had a Toyota mentor who was teaching him TPS. The Toyota mentor had [...]
You can extend Toyota Way Principle 4: Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time to the office environment. Of course you are not going to hang andon lights over everyone’s desk so they can signal in case there is a problem. Clearly the tool of andon as [...]
If American and European companies got anything from the invasion of Japanese products to the U.S. market in the 1980s, it was quality fever. The level of quality consciousness in Japanese companies made our heads spin. They were crafting fine art and we were slapping parts together. But we woke up and worked hard to [...]
This point has been made earlier in the article, but it bears repeating: the closer you are to one-piece flow, the quicker quality problems will surface to be addressed. This hit home for me personally in a unique opportunity I had in the summer of 1999. General Motors had a program through its joint venture [...]
Jidoka, the second pillar of TPS, traces back to Sakichi Toyoda and his long string of inventions that revolutionized the automatic loom. Among his inventions was a device that detected when a thread broke and, when it did, it would immediately stop the loom. You could then reset the loom and, most importantly, solve the [...]
These days aluminum gutters for houses, at least in the U.S., are mostly built to order, on-site at the house. Rolls of materials are brought to the job site, where they are cut to length, end caps are formed, and the gutters are installed. A plant in the Midwest makes much of the material that [...]
Every business would like to have a consistent volume over time so there is a consistent and predictable workload. That is an easy sell in concept. But if your sales department does not behave like Toyota Sales by cooperating to avoid spikes in demand, what can you do? The TPS expert might suggest that a [...]
Leveling out a work schedule is easier in high-volume manufacturing than in typically lower-volume service environments. How do you level schedules in a service operation where service providers are responding to customers and the lead times on service work vary widely case by case? The solutions are similar to the solutions in manufacturing: Fit customer [...]
Cho’s quote at the opening of this chapter suggested customers may have to wait a little longer if they want to order a vehicle specially built for them. He is not willing to sacrifice the quality and efficiency benefits of heijunka for the sake of “build-to-order.” Yet, other car manufacturers have developed build-to-order systems, potentially [...]
Leveling the schedule has profound benefits throughout the value stream, including giving you the ability to plan every detail of production meticulously and standardizing work practices. If you visit a Toyota plant or a Toyota supplier, you will see the great pains taken to level the schedule. The best Toyota suppliers also work on the [...]
Heijunka is the leveling of production by both volume and product mix. It does not build products according to the actual flow of customer orders, which can swing up and down wildly, but takes the total volume of orders in a period and levels them out so the same amount and mix are being made [...]