Teaching crazed quality
Toyota rose to automotive prominence, and seems headed to dominance, due mainly to a fanatical home-brewed cult of quality that produced incredibly dependable cars. But as it grows, the company is hard pressed to continually recreate its special potion for quality, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Key to the Toyota way is the notion that perfection is elusive but improvement is always possible. Continuous improvement or kaizen is the mantra. A major domo of this particular cult was Mr. Taiichi Ohno, who drew inspiration in part from 1950s-era [?] observations of American supermarket shelf-stocking methods.
But Ohno and crew’s own methods of teaching quality don’t seem to lead straight to reproducible processes. Or to readily span borders. You see, the gurus of Toyota quality have long taken a craftsmanlike, you might even say zen-like, approach to teaching. Efficiency, precision, and perfection methods were not put down in manuals, or taught in classes. Expert coordinators instead taught by prowling factory floors, attacking inefficiencies as they occurred, or by throwing their trainees into the water so to speak, ordering them to stand and observe a production line process until they discovered how it could be improved.
All well and good, but as the automation church fathers of Japan’s Toyota die, retire, or go to work for competitors, the whistler’s melody strays from the original song line. Moreover, different cultures, at least the Toyota brethren seem to claim have a different uptake on this stuff. “What was it we were supposed to do?” - the Kentucky shop crew asks, 20 years after Mr. Ohno’s last visit.
Toyota Production System gurus who return to a long-active factory – and these days they must traverse the world to hit all the Toyota plants – reportedly find that shop-floor leaders begin to spend too much time in their offices, rather than panthering about the factory floor invoking kaizen and cheerleading the assemblers.
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How many generations will it take for the scientific culture of operations to become international? Til last robot pulls last monkey wrench out of last factory humanoid’s bloody fingers, maybe. For over a hundred years now we have been familiar with the concept of society as a machine. And reflexes and machine-like qualities are valued by Americans. But it has also been very American to show some independence, and to demand some equality. We alone created the Road pictures, The Marx Brothers, and Mash, the latter a template for workplace attitude americana.
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I remember once the difficulty C. had in a brief job as an assistant to an Italian harpsichord maker, who seemed pretty much mute. Let’s call him Harpo. Nothing she did was right, and nothing was corrected. We were in quandary until a more traveled journeyman explained Harpo’s problem - well part of his problem – by telling us this fellow’s own training would have been in an apprenticeship where he spend years before he could work with tools – years during which his only job was to hand the next tool to the piano maker just when he needed it. ‘If he handed him the wrong tool he was hit with it.” Non-Mystic telegraphers need not apply.
The idea of staring at process all day, I know that. It's far away from mysticism - totally mundane. When you are working on the assembly line, you have to at least begin to think about how your labor could be eased. But in my experience there I would usually draw a blank. It was the engineer class that knew the secrets of the cogs. And man they looked like the cast out of Houston Control in Apollo 13. An engineer would come down to the floor – this is my youth at the wax factory working on some of the oldest lines they had -- and watch me work, and come back in thirty days with a mechanism to do my chores.
The guy I remember who figured out how to put the lids on the wax cans with one guy instead of two was Earl. Today, Earl and Neil Armstrong have merged as one visage in my memory bank. There was a general unease when the engineers would prowl, and I can understand why Toyota might discover its American shop-floor samurai are too often in the office. They'd want to avoid the workers' beady eyes.
Waxing mnemonic: I remember when they took some Japanese engineers through the factory circa 1969. They took them very quickly past the paste wax conveyor oven that was my lot in life at the time. Of which I was glad. Also I remember – the man with the chronometer [switching to the small foundry here], the QA guy, always lurking, checking tolerances. “How long have you been putting out these parts?’ he would snarl.
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The goal for Toyota now is to set up more formal teaching systems, and to find a way for local factory folk to run ‘the Toyota way’ without relying totally on the Japanese priesthood.
Related
As Toyota closes in on GM, quality concerns grow -WSJ, Aug 4, 2004 [sub req]
To come: Tootie
Black boxes
Auto black box behavior – EE Times Online (subscription) - Aug 9, 2004
'Black Box' in every garage - Guardian, UK - Aug 3, 2004
A Pandora's Black Box -Washington Post - Jul 26, 2004
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