May 9 2018
Inside Toyota’s Giant Kentucky Factory | Willy Shih | Forbes
“Japanese Production Techniques, Made In America. Last month I had the opportunity to visit the Toyota facto y in Georgetown, Kentucky, which is the largest vehicle assembly plant in Toyota’s global production network. I had last visited Georgetown 15 years ago, and the site has grown considerably since then. At 8.1 million square feet, it is the largest vehicle assembly plant in Toyota’s global production network. Not only can it produce 550,000 vehicles per year, it can make more than 600,000 engines annually.”
Sourced from Forbes
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Besides the above picture and the lead paragraph, there is essentially nothing in this article that couldn’t have been written without setting foot in the plant, which is disappointing from a publication like Forbes. For informative reports on factory tours, see Christoph Roser’s Grand Tour of Japanese Automotive Factories.
May 31 2018
Stability Before Innovation | James Womack | The Lean Post
“Are we in the Lean Community lacking imagination and creativity? Indeed, do we take away the time and space for creativity and imagination from employees with our focus on standardizing work and our relentless process analysis […]? Or maybe this is backwards. Is it possible that […] a stable organization with stable processes enables successful innovation? […] Contrast Toyota’s methods with those of other companies generally believed to have brilliant, innovative ideas but no robust development, production, supplier management or even customer support processes, and which are short of funds. Not just Tesla but the whole VC-backed auto start-up industry come to mind.”
Sourced from The Lean Post
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
I don’t understand why Jim Womack restricts the discussion of stability and innovation to the car industry and the comparison with other companies to “VC-backed auto start-ups” that are short of funds. Toyota’s leaders grew the company by doing what they had to do to navigate the Japanese car industry. It is, in retrospect, a spectacularly successful model and worth studying. It is not, however, universally relevant.
Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, we view it as the worldwide hub of innovation, not the Nagoya area. Local entrepreneurs, VC-backed or not, have given us multiple generations of companies that are not exactly short of cash, like Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, eBay, Netflix, Google, Facebook,… Some of them are dabbling in the auto industry but most of their revenues come from elsewhere. It doesn’t make their practices and business models any less worthy of study than Toyota’s.
#innovation, #toyota, #siliconvalley
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings, Uncategorized • • Tags: innovation, Silicon Valley, Toyota