Toyota

Toyota Motor Corporation’s vehicle production system is a way of “making things” that is sometimes referred to as a “lean manufacturing system” or a “Just-in-Time (JIT) system,” and has come to be well known and studied worldwide.
This production control system has been established based on many years of continuous improvements, with the objective of “making the vehicles ordered by customers in the quickest and most efficient way, in order to deliver the vehicles as quickly as possible.”
The Toyota Production System (TPS) was established based on two concepts: The first is called “jidoka“(which can be loosely translated as “automation with a human touch“) which means that when a problem occurs, the equipment stops immediately, preventing defective products from being produced; The second is the concept of “Just-in-Time,” in which each process produces only what is needed by the next process in a continuous flow.



Based on the basic philosophies of jidoka and Just-in-Time, the TPS can efficiently and quickly produce vehicles of sound quality, one at a time, that fully satisfy customer requirements.
Just-in-Time

“Just-in-Time” means making only “what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed.” To efficiently produce a large number of products such as automobiles, which are comprised of some 30,000 parts, it is necessary to create a detailed production plan that includes parts procurement, for example.
Supplying “what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed” according to this production plan can eliminate waste, inconsistencies, and unreasonable requirements, resulting in improved productivity.



Kanban System

In the TPS, a unique production control method called the “kanban system” plays an important role. The kanban system has also been called the “Supermarket method” because the idea behind it was borrowed from supermarkets. Supermarkets and mass merchandizing stores use product control cards on which product-related information, such as product name, product code, and storage location, is entered. Because Toyota employed kanban signs in place of the cards for use in production processes, the method came to be called the “kanban system.” At Toyota, when a process goes to the preceding process to retrieve parts, it uses a kanban to communicate what parts have been used.

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Toyota

Prius: Not built by Dilberts.

* GM and Ford can’t design vehicles that Americans want to pay “Toyota money” for. And this is not a matter of bad bets on product concepts or dumb engineers. It’s a matter of Toyota’s better engineering system, using simple concepts like chief engineers with real responsibility for products, concurrent and simultaneous engineering practices, and sophisticated knowledge capture methods. The Prius is not the result of a hunch or luck but rather the likely result of a development system that tries out many approaches to every problem, then gets the winning concept to the customer very quickly with low engineering cost, low manufacturing cost, and near perfect quality. (That’s not to say that Toyota can’t produce a dud — the first-generation Previa minivan and Tundra pickup stand out — but the likelihood of producing winners is higher than with traditional development systems.)



* GM and Ford are clueless as to how to work with their suppliers. Sometimes they try to crush their bones — which only works when the suppliers have any profits to squeeze, and few currently do. Then they embrace contentless cooperation that makes everyone feel better briefly but fails to produce lower costs, higher quality, or new and better technology. Toyota, by contrast, is getting brilliant results and lower prices from American suppliers like Delphi while also giving suppliers adequate profit margins. How? By relentlessly analyzing every step in their shared design and production process to take out the waste and put in the quality.

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