We recognize Toyota cars when we see them out on the street, in the parking lots, or in the showrooms. For many of us – Toyota car owners or not – Toyota cars project prestige, reliability, and quality. Unfortunately Toyota’s brand has been tarnished recently by the massive recalls mainly in the United States (US) due to faults in the acceleration and braking systems, among others. Toyota’s recent woes go beyond engineering realm. Toyota is known not only for its manufacturing excellence, but also for its corporate culture that incorporates continuous improvement principle, or ‘kaizen’. Implementing ‘kaizen’ requires empowerment of those people closest to the work process, to continuously improve and improvise.
Implementing ‘kaizen’ also implies spreading what you have learned and repeating it. ‘Kaizen’ is one of the pillars of the Toyota Way – an expression of values and conduct guidelines that all Toyota employees should embrace. Practising the Toyota Way philosophy, Toyota surpassed General Motors as the world’s biggest automaker in 2007. Countless books and articles have been published, commending the philosophy. And the engineer who developed the philosophy, Taiichi Ohno, was still revered as a god at Toyota.
Despite the recent events, Toyota knew how to protect their brand and win back their customers trust. In 1989, Toyota acted quickly to recall its Lexus cars, which were plagued with tail lamp overheating. In addition, Toyota provided each of the 8,000 Lexus owners with a free loaner while repairs were under way. The cars were washed and returned to their owners with a full tank of gas. Today, almost 20 years since they remarkably handled the quality issue in the Lexus model, Toyota has been slow to admit that they knew about the flaws before the problems surfaced, and have recalled close to nine million cars worldwide since October 2009. So what happened at Toyota? Have they failed to practice what they preached, i.e. ‘kaizen’?
The problem with Toyota seems to lie in its fast growth. In 2000, Toyota produced 5.2 million cars; in 2008, it had the capacity to produce 10 million. In between these years, Toyota added 17 production sites. Though rapid expansion benefited the company, it also put enormous pressure on the company’s ability to transfer corporate knowledge either from experienced staff to newer staff, or from one site to the other. Toyota’s incredible growth also means that it has inadvertently shifted its focus from quality to quantity. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Operation Expert, Steven Spears, acknowledged this and added that shared corporate knowledge, which was accumulated by elite cadres of engineers and assembly workers over many years, was diluted by the demands of production.
References
Saporito, B., Schuman, M., & Szczesny, J., R. (11 February 2010). What Went Wrong At Toyota. Time. Retrieved from http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100211/wl_time/08599196359500
Kageyama, Y. (14 February 2010). Recall woes show new challenges for ‘Toyota Way’. Associated Press. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art icle/ALeqM5jK_AVbnICpOLuI6akGkrKGa5uaDQD9DRSP300
Crawley, J., et. al. (10 February 2010). REPEATSPECIALREPORT-Inside Toyota’s epic breakdown. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0910439220100210
Kaizen. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen#The_five_main_elements_of_kaizen
Maynard, M. (25 April 2007). Move Over G.M., Toyota Is No. 1. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/automobiles/25auto.html
Philips, M. (3 February 2010). Toyota’s Digital Disaster. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/id/232962
Negishi, M. (4 February 2010). Toyota’s grapples with PR bungles, tarnished brand. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.asiaone.com/Motoring/News/Story/A1Story20100204-196589.html
Saporito, B. (4 February 2010). Toyota’s Flawed Focus on Quantity Over Quality. Time. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1958991,00.html
Hi, I read your blogg and I am very impressed by your opinions. I have a question: What would you say would be the different functionalities of a social network platform (like facebook…) from a KM-perspective.
Thanks for reading my blog. In my opinion, the various features of a social network platform such as status update, group discussions, helps to facilitate conversation and build communities of people with the same passion / interests. Eventually, the ongoing conversations within a thriving community help to manage collective know-hows (knowledge).
Working for a corporation that has adopted kaizen as a way of life and mimicked Toyota as if an idol, over the period of a decade personal expertise has been lost, if not outright disdained as some rogue methodology or personal trait at odds with kaizen, where each individual is granted as being as ‘expert’ as the next.
Lacking technical expertise, actual product design becomes more and more outsourced, however those ventures frequently fail or are plagued with technical issues as no one remains that can both specify and oversee the complexity of engineering design processes. Instead, success is left to chance, and failure blamed (similarly outsourced) on the contractor. A case in point being Toyota’s gas pedal design outsourced to CTS.
One cannot continually improve engineering science. It is based upon immutable physical laws and applied mathematics, and practiced those having survived a curriculum of calculus, differential equations, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, material science, statics and dynamics. Without these foundations, and all of these, one cannot competently execute the complexities of design.
Unfortunately, the rising corporate stars have become process people such as Taiichi Ohno. They are readily emulated by those wanting to advance, and they do. Corporations spend big money to have people brought in to teach processes. Yet, do today’s corporation repay tuition of you want to take a calculus or physics class?
Could Taiichi Ohno have derived the Nyquist plot of the Camry’s throttle control system’s transfer function to insure unconditional stability? Would he have achieved similar renown and reward? Heck, would there be anyone in management that could even comprehend its significance? Likely, he’d be perceived as a trouble maker. Therein lies the problem.
Once can manufacture with quality and excellence, however one can easily mass produce inherent design flaws with quality and excellence too, and moreover be completely unaware.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Global-Viewpoint/2010/0224/The-Toyota-problem-Where-the-car-giant-went-wrong