This morning we were fortunate enough to be given a tour of Toyota UK’s main plant near Derby. It was fascinating to see where so many of the concepts and principles that have transformed our company over the last 2 years have come from.
Automation is visible everywhere in the plant. Robots are involved at almost every step of the process, improving efficiency and precision, and removing dangerous or repetitive tasks from human employees. We use automation to run our tests, and assess the condition of all our applications at any time.
Jidoka means “automation with a human touch”. The idea is that Toyota’s robots are smart enough to know when they’ve done something wrong and stop themselves at that point. This prevents a problem from progressing any further until it has been resolved. We use jidoka to signal when any of our applications have failed a unit test or integration test. At this point an alarm sounds and our status monitor shows us a red screen. This enables us to stop work and fix the problem.
Kanban, meaning “sign board”, is a system of representing tasks or orders using cards, which move around the production line as required. They’re a great way of keeping track of any particular piece of work within your value stream. Toyota invented kanban in order to identify problem areas and promote improvements. The cards are used widely throughout the plant, and we’ve taken the concept and applied it to our own value stream. Using kanban we can identify bottlenecks, and easily see who’s working on what, and where any piece of work is at any time, from the time it’s requested up until it has been deployed live.
Kaizen is the continuous improvement of processes through regularly reflecting on how each activity within the value stream can be improved. Currently Toyota use the whole of each Friday for kaizen, rewarding teams or members when they identify areas that can be improved. We hold regular retrospectives to assess good and bad aspects of our work, modifying our process as appropriate. We have also begun identifying areas of waste within our process, and focussing on a few at a time to find improvements.
We noticed that Toyota believe there’s no substitute for human testing. Despite the high levels of automation and automated testing througout the production line, human quality control checks are regularly made. In addition, the final stage of the production line involves thorough checks inside and out of every vehicle, before it is driven around a short figure-of-8 circuit. A sample of cars each day are taken around the plant’s 2.3km test track.
It was a shame that the Q&A session leader was not familiar with the term hansei, a word which has no direct English translation, but whose meaning is to acknowledge and take responsibility for one’s mistakes, and pledge improvement by evaluating the cause of the problem and finding ways to prevent it from recurring. This is a key difference between Japanese and Western business culture, and is clearly visible every time a Japanese CEO steps aside when there is a scandal at their company, whether they were involved or not. In the West we tend to favour CYA instead.
All in all it was a great experience. We’ve been chatting about it ever since we got back to the office. I think any company could learn a whole lot from Toyota. A visit to the plant is free, with a suggested £5 donation to charity.
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