![]() I had been visiting the plant for a week or so. To my mind, it represented a knee-buckling amount of investment compared with systems I’d seen at Toyota, where a new tool might rely on sticky notes and signature cards until its merits were proved.Īn executive was explaining to me how successful the implementation had been and how well the company was doing with lean. Featuring plasma-screen monitors at every workstation, the system had required a considerable development and programming effort to implement. Many executives will have heard of the andon cord, a Toyota innovation now common in many automotive and assembly environments: line workers are empowered to address quality or other problems by stopping production. (Whenever I hear executives say “we did kaizen,” which in fact is an entire philosophy, I know they don’t get it.) For example, the manufacturer I mentioned earlier had recently put in an andon system, to alert management about problems on the line. Companies that can use crises to their advantage will always excel against self-satisfied organizations that already feel they’re the best at what they do.Ī common characteristic of companies struggling to achieve continuous improvement is that they pick and choose the lean tools they want to use, without necessarily understanding how these tools operate as a system. When Toyota faced serious problems related to the unintended acceleration of some vehicles, for example, we took this as an opportunity to revisit everything we did to ensure quality in the design of vehicles-from engineering and production to the manufacture of parts and so on. Only through honest self-reflection can senior executives learn to focus on the things that need improvement, learn how to close the gaps, and get to where they need to be as leaders.Ī self-reflective culture is also likely to contribute to what I call a “no excuse” organization, and this is valuable in times of crisis. It’s a deep part of the culture to create new challenges constantly and not to rest when you meet old ones. What happens in Toyota’s culture is that as soon as you start making a lot of progress toward a goal, the goal is changed and the carrot is moved. When he asked me about my experiences at Toyota over the years and the scores its units received, I answered candidly that the best score I’d ever seen was a 3.2-and that was only for a year, before the unit fell back. The executive was describing how his unit scored a five-a perfect score. The tool measures a host of categories (such as safety, quality, cost, and human development) and averages the scores on a scale of zero to five. When I recently visited a large manufacturer, for example, I compared notes with a company executive about an evaluation tool it had adapted from Toyota. A lot of executives have a propensity to talk about the good things they’re doing rather than focus on applying resources to the things that aren’t what they want them to be. ![]() The reality is that many senior executives-and by extension many organizations-aren’t nearly as self-reflective or objective about evaluating themselves as they should be. Through my exposure to different manufacturing environments, I’ve been surprised to find that senior managers often feel they’ve been very successful in their efforts to emulate Toyota’s production system-when in fact their progress has been limited. One huge barrier to both goals is complacency. Both are absolutely required in order for lean to work. The two pillars of the Toyota way of doing things are kaizen (the philosophy of continuous improvement) and respect and empowerment for people, particularly line workers. After all, the goal is continuous improvement. Of course, this will come as no surprise for any student of the Toyota production system and should even serve as a challenge. What’s more, the goal line itself is moving-and will go on moving-as companies such as Toyota continue to define the cutting edge. Yet I’ve also found that even though companies are currently benefiting from lean, they have largely just scratched the surface, given the benefits they could achieve. Through that exposure, I’ve been struck by how much the Toyota production system has already changed the face of operations and management, and by the energy that companies continue to expend in trying to apply it to their own operations. In the two years since I retired as president and CEO of Canadian Autoparts Toyota (CAPTIN), I’ve had the good fortune to work with many global manufacturers in different industries on challenges related to lean management.
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