Hi Tejek, Not for the employees outside of Japan
Many of their employees are in Japan. There is whole city named after Toyota in Japan..........Toyota City. Three point five million of their cars are made in Japan; less than 2 million in the rest of the world.
Here's why Toyota is on top:
"First, of course, it taught the modern car industry how to make cars properly. Few had heard of the Toyota Production System (TPS) until three academics in the car industry study programme run by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wrote a book in 1991 called “The Machine that Changed the World”. It described the principles and practices behind the “just-in-time” manufacturing system developed at Toyota by Taiichi Ohno. He in turn had drawn inspiration from W. Edwards Deming, an influential statistician and quality-control expert who had played a big part in developing the rapid-manufacturing processes used by America during the second world war.
At the core of TPS is elimination of waste and absolute concentration on consistent high quality by a process of continuous improvement (kaizen). The catchy just-in-time aspect of bringing parts together just as they are needed on the line is only the clearest manifestation of the relentless drive to eliminate muda (waste) from the manufacturing process. The world's motor industry, and many other branches of manufacturing, rushed to embrace and adopt the principles of TPS.
In the process American and European cars went from being unreliable, with irritating breakdowns, leaks and bits dropping off in the 1970s, to the sturdy, reliable models consumers take for granted today. In real terms car prices may only have edged down over the past two decades compared with the drastic reductions seen in personal computers and all consumer-electronics goods. But the quality, content and economy of today's cars is incomparable with what was on offer 30 years ago. The main credit goes to the Japanese, led by Toyota. High petrol prices drove American consumers to buy economical Japanese imports; high quality kept them coming back. Europeans, too, were quick to see the attraction of cars that seldom broke down, unlike the native varieties. When trade barriers were erected, the Japanese built their plants inside them. Toyota may have been slower than Honda or Nissan to expand abroad, but its manufacturing method gave it an advantage once it did so.
So Toyota's success starts with its brilliant production engineering, which puts quality control in the hands of the line workers who have the power to stop the line or summon help the moment something goes wrong. Walk into a Toyota factory in Japan or America, Derby in Britain or Valenciennes in France and you will see the same visual displays telling you everything that is going on. You will also hear the same jingles at the various work stations telling you a model is being changed, an operation has been completed or a brief halt called.
Everything is minutely synchronised; the work goes at the same steady cadence of one car a minute rolling off the final assembly line. Each operation along the way takes that time. No one rushes and there are cute slings and swivelling loaders to take the heavy lifting out of the work. But there is much more to the soul of the Toyota machine than a dour, relentless pursuit of perfection in its car factories.
Another triumph is the slick product-development process that can roll out new models in barely two years. As rival Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of Nissan, notes in his book “Shift” (about how he turned around the weakest of Japan's big three), as soon as Toyota bosses spot a gap in the market or a smart new product from a rival, they swiftly move in with their own version. The result is a bewildering array of over 60 models in Japan and loads of different versions in big overseas markets such as Europe and America. Of course, under the skin, these share many common parts. Toyota has long been the champion of putting old wine in new bottles: over two-thirds of a new vehicle will contain the unseen parts of a previous model."
and......
"Mr Cho thinks something of the unique Toyota culture comes from the fact that the company grew up in one place, Toyota City, 30 minutes drive from Nagoya in central Japan, where the company has four assembly plants surrounded by the factories of suppliers. In this provincial, originally rural setting, Toyota workers in the early days would often have small plots of land that they tended after their shift. Mr Cho, who made his career in the company by being a pupil of Mr Ohno and becoming a master of production control, thinks that the fact that Toyota managers and their suppliers see each other every day makes for a sort of hothouse culture—rather like Silicon Valley in its early days."
economist.com
ted |
