Toyota

Jun 4 2015

Human Resources at Toyota

With Respect for Humanity, bowdlerized as “Respect for People,” made into a pillar of The Toyota Way, you might expect Toyota’s Human Resources (HR) policies to be studied, scrutinized, discusses extensively in the Lean literature, and argued over in numerous forums. But it’s not the case.

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Mar 30 2015

Toyota’s car factory of the future | Autocar Professional

“Toyota says it has has completely re-thought the way its future car factories will operate. Its plans for the new-generation factories – nicknamed ‘simple and slim’ – are well advanced. Toyota claims they will be 25 percent smaller than existing plants, require 40% less investment and emit up to 55% less CO2. Toyota also plans to re-engineer the production lines so they can be shortened or lengthened in less than 80 minutes. It’s claimed that a standard line can be shrunk from a 100,000 car-per-year capacity to just 50,000 cars, or vice versa. This would allow capacity to be easily reduced or increased depending on demand”

Source: www.autocarpro.in

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Thanks to Rob van Stekelenborg, a.k.a. Dumontis, for this scoop, which, again provides more specifics on Toyota’s plans, including surface-mounted conveyors, smaller paint shops, laser screw welding, what sounds like induction heating of sheet metal for stamping, and a variety of energy saving techniques.

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Mar 30 2015

Toyota’s Shared-Parts Strategy | IndustryWeek

“Toyota said the move, aimed at cutting development costs by 20%, would start with mid-sized, front-wheel-drive vehicles this year. It wants half of vehicles it sells globally by 2020 to fall under the new platform strategy.”

Source: www.industryweek.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Specifics are trickling out about Toyota’s plans. It seems that they want to make more different products from fewer components and have plants that are competitive even at low volume.

Readers’ comments on the idea of having fewer platforms and more common parts are focused on the risk of extensive recalls, and the way such recalls can wipe out any savings achieved by the strategy.

It really is a matter of degree and of execution. Having fewer dashboard options might reduce the attractiveness of your products, but using fewer types of proportioning valves will not. Also, it is easier to ensure not only availability but quality as well for fewer components, making recalls less likely.

With regards to volume in a given plant, Toyota’s strategy seems a continuation of their work on the Global Body Line, in which the same infrastructure and fixtures could be used for robotic welding at high volume and manual welding at low volume.

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Mar 28 2015

Toyota Unveils Revamped Manufacturing Process | Yoko Kubota | Wall Street Journal

“Toyota broke a two-year silence on a revamped manufacturing process—built on sharing components among vehicles—that it says will produce half its vehicles by 2020 and slash costs. But its unveiling follows a path blazed in recent years by German rival Volkswagen AG—a reversal for the Japanese pioneer, whose production system was for decades seen as the gold standard, giving the world such manufacturing concepts as ‘just-in-time inventory’ and ‘continuous improvement.'”

Source: www.wsj.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Other than that Toyota has a plan, the article does not directly reveal specifics. As several readers pointed out in their comments, sharing components across models is not a new idea and is not risk-free, even if executed perfectly, as it reduces the differences between your standard and luxury models in ways that customers may notice.

The most revealing parts of the article, to me, are (1) the reference to VW, and (2) the keyword “modular assembly.” I don’t believe that Toyota has borrowed much from VW since the look of the 1947 Toyota SA, a dead-ringer for the already dated but yet to be successful beetle.

Modular assembly sounds self-explanatory but it isn’t. It is a specific approach to assembling cars brought to VW by former GM purchasing executive Jose Ignacio Lopez in the 1990s, in which up to 90% of the work traditionally done in a car assembly plant is done by suppliers and all that remains is the final assembly of large subsystems.

The Porsche plant in Leipzig, for example, does not stamp, weld, or paint car bodies. It receives them ready to assemble, in a spotlessly clean facility that customers are encouraged to visit.

Porsche-Leipzig
The Porsche plant in Leipzig

The whole site is in fact dominated by its visitor center, complete with a fine-dining restaurant overlooking the plant and where new buyers can receive an hour’s worth of training on their new cars on the test track. In the same spirit, VW has set up an assembly plant in downtown Dresden, with glass walls to enable passers by to watch cars being assembled.

Modular assembly was used by GM in Lordstown, OH, in 1999, and then by VW in Spain, and by DaimlerBenz for the Smart in Hambach, France . At the time, Toyota evaluated the concept and passed on it. Apparently, Toyota’s production leaders changed their minds.

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Feb 16 2015

Buy More Robots? | Adams Nager | IndustryWeek

“More robots means lower unemployment and better trade performance. […] The United States does not lose jobs because there is not enough work to be done but rather because U.S. industry is not competitive with foreign producers. More robots will help fix this.”

Source: www.industryweek.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:Really? If you are not competitive, just buy more robots! But wait… Haven’t we heard this before? Isn’t it what GM did in the 1980s? Under Roger Smith’s leadership, from 1980 to 1989, GM spent about $40B on robots, and this investment didn’t make it competitive.

It doesn’t mean robots are bad, only that they are not a panacea. Toyota’s Global Body Line is designed to use welding robots where they are justified, and manual welding where not, using the same fixtures.

In an auto parts plant in Japan, I remember seeing a machining cell with old machines served by robots. A few yards away were new, automated lines that didn’t use robots.

It looked very much as if the old cell with new robots was the result of incremental automation, and that the lessons learned had been applied in the design of the new lines.

Robots are tools. If you know how to use them, they will help you; if you don’t, buying more is just a waste of money.

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1934-Model-A

Feb 1 2015

Origin of One-Piece Flow at Toyota | Chip Chapados | LinkedIn

According to Chip Chapados, the concept of one-piece flow emerged from the need to rapidly detect defects in engine castings when Kiichiro Toyoda was reverse-engineering a Chevrolet engine in 1934, and it was originally called “one-by-one confirmation.”

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