As president of Toyota, Cho had to learn to rely more on trust than he did in the days of running a few manufacturing plants. He doesn’t have the time to go and see everything for himself. Instead, he surrounds himself with people he trusts and, by default, goes and sees secondhand through them. But [...]

Kiichiro Toyoda learned from his father the importance of getting your hands dirty and learning by doing. He insisted on this from all of his engineers. A famous story about Toyoda has become part of Toyota’s cultural heritage : One day Kiichiro Toyoda was walking through the vast plant when he came upon a worker [...]

The 2004 Sienna is what Toyota considers a major redesign—a new and improved version of its highly ranked minivan. Toyota engineered it to be bigger, faster, smoother, quieter, and about $1,000 cheaper. Toyota also designed in many small but important enhancements that make life easier for the North American driver. Many of these enhancements were [...]

David Baxter is a vice president at the Toyota Technical Center. At one point he was responsible for evaluating supplier parts. When Toyota launched a version of the Camry in 1997, they had a wire harness problem. Yazaki Corporation, a parts supplier to Toyota in Japan, supplied the problem wire harness. What happened next is [...]

There are many stories about the famous Ohno circle. I was fortunate to speak in person with Teruyuki Minoura, who at the time was president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, North America. He had learned TPS directly from the master and part of his early education at Toyota was standing in a circle: Minoura: Mr. Ohno [...]

Literally translated, Genchi means the actual location and genbutsu means the actual materials or products. But genchi genbutsu is interpreted within Toyota to mean going to the place to see the actual situation for understanding. Gemba is a term that has become more popular. It refers to “the actual place” and means about the same [...]

While musing over American Auto’s debacle with suppliers and wondering why it wanted to take an elevator to the top without stopping at any of the floors in between, I began to conceptualize the problem as a pyramid or hierarchy. Thinking back to college social psychology, I thought of Maslow’s needs hierarchy, discussed briefly in [...]

The TSSC by design is not part of the business relationship with suppliers. It is there to educate through projects. Toyota purchasing has its own quality and TPS experts to work with suppliers when there are problems, the most severe of which is when a supplier shuts down the Toyota assembly plant because of a [...]

One way that Toyota has honed its skills in applying TPS is by working on projects with suppliers. Toyota needs its suppliers to be as capable as its own plants at building and delivering high-quality components just in time. Moreover, Toyota cannot cut costs unless suppliers cut costs, lest Toyota simply push cost reductions onto [...]

Toyota is very careful when deciding what to outsource and what to do in house. Like other Japanese automakers, Toyota outsources a lot, about 70% of the components of the vehicle. But it still wants to maintain internal competency even in components it outsources. These days a management buzzword is “core competency.” Toyota has a [...]

An excellent example of the contrast in approaches between Toyota and its competitors is in how Toyota approached the logistic challenges in building manufacturing and supply chain capabilities in North America. How can Toyota assembly plants get just-in-time delivery of parts multiple times per day to U.S.-based plants when they are spread across the U.S. [...]

Go to a conference on supply chain management and what are you likely to hear? You will learn a lot about “streamlining” the supply chain through advanced information technology. If you can get the information in nanoseconds, you should be able to speed the supply chain to nanosecond deliveries, right? What you are not likely [...]

Toyota invests in people and in return it gets committed associates who show up to work every day and on time and are continually improving their operations. On one of my visits, I found that in the past year at the Toyota, Georgetown, assembly plant associates made about 80,000 improvement suggestions. The plant implemented 99% [...]

Taylor’s Scientific Management. Taylorism is the ultimate in external motivation. People come to work to make money—end of story. You motivate workers by giving them clear standards, teaching them the most efficient way to reach the standard, and then giving them bonuses when they exceed the standard. The standards are for quantity, not quality. In [...]

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow’s need hierarchy looks at motivating people as equivalent to satisfying their internal needs. Your highest level of motivation will be to do the things that better you as a person—called “self-actualization.” But there are a few steps you have to take before you can get there. Humans can work [...]

Most of us at some point in our education learned about human motivation. If you took a class, you may recall a dizzying array of different theories and theorists and no clear way of figuring out who was right or wrong. Which motivation theory does Toyota, implicitly, subscribe to? As it turns out, all of [...]

In a conventional automotive plant, white-collar or skilled-trade staff is responsible for problem solving, quality assurance, equipment maintenance, and productivity. By contrast, shop floor work groups are the focal point for problem solving in the Toyota Production System . Source: Bill Constantino, former group leader, Toyota, Georgetown The associates who perform the value-added jobs are [...]

One surprise I had when I was visiting the Hebron operation was the frequent reference to “situational leadership” that they had learned from Ken Blanchard, famed author of The One-Minute Manager. This was only one of a number of leadership models they had learned from, but it at first struck me as incongruous with the [...]

By the time Toyota began setting up its service parts facility in Hebron, Kentucky, the management team had learned from experience that a successful startup depended much more on creating a Toyota culture than on building a facility with the right technology. Years earlier, Toyota set up a global service parts distribution center in Ontario, [...]

Talk to somebody at Toyota about the Toyota Production System and you can hardly avoid getting a lecture on the importance of teamwork. All systems are there to support the team doing value-added work. But teams do not do value-added work. Individuals do. The teams coordinate the work, motivate, and learn from each other. Teams [...]