Toyota

Internal-Combustion-Pneumatic-Core5

Sep 29 2025

My Toyota Forklift

For most participants, Day 2 of the Global Lean Summit was a visit to the Toyota Material Handling (TMH) plant in Columbus, IN, organized by Sam McPherson and hosted by Tom Lego.  There were two busloads of us.

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RotationWheel

Feb 7 2024

Toyota’s job rotation policy

Kerry Creech became President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Kentucky (TMMK) in July 2023. He had joined Toyota as a team member in powertrain quality control in Georgetown, KY in 1990. Toyota’s policy of developing people and promoting from within made this career possible. Kerry Creech got a degree in electrical and electronics engineering in 2010 while a manager at Toyota.

There are many dimensions to Toyota’s Human Resource Management, and I would like to focus this post on the specifics of Job Rotation as a policy that sets Toyota apart from most other manufacturing companies. A blog reader asked about it, so I checked with Tracey Richardson for accurate details, at least for Toyota’s US operations when she was working there.

There are two types of rotations, involving, in different ways, production operators – “team members” in Toyota parlance – and the support staff, starting with first-line managers – known as “group leaders.”

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StadiumConcertBlog

Dec 30 2023

Greatest Hits of 2023

This blog’s greatest hits of 2023:

  1. Nissan’s Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)
  2. Runners, Repeaters, and Strangers among Components
  3. Where do “Value Stream Maps” come from?
  4. The Fox Knows Many Things, But The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing
  5. Deming’s Point 4 of 14 – End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag
  6. Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?
  7. Does Toyota Use SPC?
  8. Deming’s Point 3 of 14 – Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality…
  9. Deming’s Point 5 of 14 – Improve Constantly and Forever the System of Production and Service
  10. Deming’s Point 11.b of 14 – Deming versus Drucker
  11. Metrics in Lean – Chart junk in performance boards and presentations
  12. Why “Smart” part numbers should be replaced with keys and property lists
  13. Wrong things ChatGPT says about me
  14. Project Manager Versus Chief Engineer: What’s The Difference?
  15. Deming’s point 1 of 14: Create constancy of purpose…
  16. Why 5S fails
  17. Quality in a Manufacturing System
  18. Why we Need a Quality Department
  19. Orbit charts, and why you should use them
  20. What is an A3?

#greatesthitsof2023, #quality, #VSM, #ValueStreamMap, #deming, #toyota

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airportsignaltufte.gif

Feb 20 2022

Visual Management

[Featured image from Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information)

Tracey Richardson started a spirited discussion on LinkedIn just by posting this quote, presumably from Toyota training materials, and asking “what else would you add to describe ‘Visual Management’”:

TraceyRichardsonQuote

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NBCamazon

Jan 24 2022

Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?

In 2019, Christoph Roser posted six articles on his blog about the inner workings of Amazon Fulfillment Centers, based on visits to locations in the US and Germany. His blog is called AllAboutLean but the word “Lean” appears nowhere in his articles about Amazon. “Six Sigma” does not appear either, and Christoph does not mention meeting any black belt.

In addition, in  Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (2021), Amazon alumni  Colin Bryar and Bill Carr make no reference to Lean, and all they report about Six Sigma is using DMAIC to define metrics.

Yet you find some published descriptions of Amazon as a showcase for Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma but, if you consider them without confirmation bias, the evidence is underwhelming. The keywords appear, along with a few more, like “Operational Excellence” or “Scrum.”

Based on the small amount of published data, the leaders of Amazon, starting with Jeff Bezos, “learned a bunch of techniques, like Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and other incredibly useful approaches.”

In other words, they learned everything they could get their hands on while staking out uncharted territory. Then they developed their own system. Now they are sharing with outsiders a few homilies but no details, as is their privilege. Their system is to retail as Toyota’s is to manufacturing. It’s not reducible to Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma.

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Pokayoke

Sep 26 2020

More about Toyota and SPC

The post on Does Toyota Use SPC? elicited many comments on LinkedIn. Some suggested that it was scoping SPC too narrowly when contrasting it with Toyota’s approach. In fact, SPC as referenced in the post is the body of knowledge described in the American literature on quality and taught in professional courses.

As to why Toyota is not using SPC, the answer is simple: SPC is about process capability and the quality problems Toyota addresses in 2020 are not due to lack of process capability. In industries that lack process capability, modern data science outguns the old SPC toolkit but that is a different discussion. The most vital question raised in the comments was why we have been not learning Toyota’s approach to quality. In the past 30 years, American industry has learned “Lean Six Sigma” instead.

The comments also enriched the public sources of information cited in the post with corroboration by current and former employees of Toyota.

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