Three things visible during the tour
Three things were extremely visible everywhere in the plant: visualization, order and hard work:
- Visualization: everywhere in the factory we could see clear signs showing where items should be put, large displays showing status, delays or problems, Poka-Yoke giving information about properly performed work, or Kanban showing what parts need to be delivered. Simple, clear tools make all information available to everyone, including visitors. I’d love to see this kind of visualization in Agile teams.
- Order: everything in the Toyota plant was in its place. I’ve seen several factories claiming to implement Lean. In most cases, however, items in these plants were not in the right place. Racks and boxes were randomly scattered around the factory. That was not the case in Takaoka. I was unable to find one part not in its clearly defined place. Everyone knows where to put parts and where to look for them
- Hard work: we were looking for a while at the car assembly and the speed the workers were doing their tasks was impressive. Just-in-time put pressure on people to finish their work on time. Of course, if they cannot, there are many systems to address the problem including Andon and Poka-Yoke. However, the pace was fast and I don’t think I could do their work for 8 hours.
Three TPS tools I’ve seen
The things I was especially looking for were process tools that Toyota is famous for. I was able to spot three of them:
- Kanban Cards: to control the flow of parts through the factory Toyota uses a very simple tool in the form of a physical card. The cards can be spotted everywhere. Every card specifies either what’s in the box, or what should be in the box – the order sent to the supplier.
- Poka-Yoke: this is a visual indicator of correctly performed work. It has the form of a rod with three lights just like traffic lights. Yellow indicates that some assembly step, such as screwing two bolts, needs to be done; green means that the step has been performed successfully and red means it was not successfully done but the part, such as the engine, moved to the next assembly station. In this case, the production will be stopped until the problem is solved.
- Andon: has a form of rope that hangs over the heads of employees. Any worker is encouraged to pull the line in case he or she notices any problem or cannot perform the assigned task correctly on time due to various reasons. In this case, the team lead will help to solve the problem and if that cannot be done before the car moves to the next station, the whole production line will be stopped. It might seem like a huge risk to give everyone on the factory floor the power to stop the line, but it’s a clear signal that quality has the highest priority and any defective part should not go down the line. I find it as the most empowering tool in TPS as well.
Seven facts I didn’t know.
I’ve seen a lot of things I’ve been reading about for the last ten years. However, I’ve learned today few interesting things as well. The seven most important for me are:
- Of the twelve Toyota plants in Japan, ten of them are in the Toyota City region. Most of the suppliers are within a one to two hours drive from the plants, so all parts can be delivered quickly. Toyota is more collocated than most IT companies I know, despite the knowledge transfer seems to be even more difficult than the transportation of physical goods.
- New employees start by joining a 6-9 weeks training program. It consists of the Toyota philosophy followed by learning assembly tasks. Its duration is adjusted to the personal abilities of each employee. I’d love to see this kind of investment in developers from software people.
- Toyota can extend or shorten its assembly line over the weekend to speed up or slow down production. They don’t do it by firing or hiring new people, but by changing tools to more adaptive ones. How long does it take usually in a big IT company to obtain new tools?
- During the day the workers rotate through different stations to avoid injuries and boredom from repetitive tasks. If a line worker needs an unplanned bio-break he or she will pull Andon line. The team Leader will replace an employee for that period. This means, that everyone on the team needs to be able to perform all the tasks of the team and the Leader should understand them better than the members of his team.
- Four different models are assembled on the same production line. These come with different engines, interiors and even with driving wheel on the right or left side. These cars are not produced in batches, but every car differs from the previous one.
- It takes seventeen hours to assemble one car, from stamping to final inspection. Every minute new car leaves the assembly line.
- Roughly half of the electric power used by the Tsutsumi plant is generated from solar panels installed on the site.
The bottom line – it was great to see things I had been learning about for years. It was a learning opportunity as well. Finally, we just had an awesome time taking advantage of Omotenashi or Japanese hospitality. I highly recommend visiting the Toyota plant to anyone interested in TPS or Lean.
A bit of History
Toyota Motor Company was established by Kichiro Toyoda who sold the company’s automatic loom business and decided to invest in car manufacturing. The first plant named Honsa started operation in 1938, a few years before Japan joined the Pacific War (World War II). After the war, Japan experienced extreme economic difficulty. Due to this, Toyota couldn’t copy the Mass Production system used by Western auto manufacturers and started developing their system (Toyota Production System), known in the West as Lean. In the ’70s Toyota opened five production plants in Japan and in 1984 opened its first factory abroad – the NUMMI plant in the USA. In 2008 Toyota surpassed General Motors as the World’s Largest Automaker.
You can learn more about Toyota Tour at the Toyota Kaikan site