Page 42 - The Toyota Way Fieldbook

20 THE TOYOTA WAY FIELDBOOK

on time, and allows Toyota to get paid without holding enormous amounts of
inventory. Similar lean processes can be found in product development, where
Toyota has the fastest development times in the industry, getting updated
styling and features to customers faster, with higher quality, and at a lower cost
than competitors. And lean internal processes even extend throughout Toyota’s
business support functions, to sales, purchasing, production engineering, and
planning, though the lean processes are not as formalized as in manufacturing
and product development.
What is less understood is that lean systems are not just about tools and tech-
niques, but about philosophy. For example, it’s easy to understand how elimi-
nating waste using lean tools will lead to immediate financial returns. But what
about the necessity of creating some waste in the short term in order to elimi-
nate waste in the long term? Consider the following scenarios:

1. To treat the value-added worker as a surgeon and get him or her all the
tools and parts needed to do the job without distracting the worker from
value-added work may require some non-value-added preparation. Tools
and parts may need to be prepared in advance in right-sized containers
or kits, and a material handler might need to bring these frequently to the
place where value-added work is being done.
2. To reduce batch size and improve the flow of parts through the system
may require changing over the tooling on a piece of equipment more fre-
quently, incurring additional setup costs. SMED (single minute exchange
of dies) procedures can dramatically reduce the setup time and cost, but
many companies want to use that saved time to produce more parts, adding
to overproduction instead of using the time to reduce batch size.
3. To improve the quality and reduce the lead time of the product develop-
ment process may require investing in dedicated chief engineers who run
the programs but do not manage the people working on the programs.
This is an additional role beyond that of the more typical program man-
ager role. Chief engineers have a lot of responsibility and need to be well
paid.
4. Improving the quality of a product launch may require involving suppliers
early in the process and partnering with suppliers that are highly compe-
tent technically, thus paying more money per piece initially, rather than
seeking the lowest cost commodity producer.
In other words, it may be necessary to invest some money in the short term to
get the high-quality lean processes needed to save money in the long term. And to
make matters worse, it may not be easy to exactly calculate the savings attributable
to a particular action that costs some money. For example, what is the benefit of pro-
ducing smaller batch sizes compared to the cost of changing over more frequently?