Page 472 - The Toyota Way Fieldbook

442 THE TOYOTA WAY FIELDBOOK

The next issue concerned the footprint of the machining line. There
was not much room in the proposed A1 area, but the team wanted
to follow Yoshina’s recommendation to maintain a straight-line flow.
They recalled Yoshina’s comments on the strength of this approach
during an earlier meeting:
A plant is like a show window for customers. The way the
machines are laid out should make a good impression on
visitors. No isolated islands are allowed. The lines and machines
should be laid out straight so we can see far ahead along the
neat line. The flow from receiving the material to shipping the
finished goods should be simple. Only when cycle times are
fairly long and the operator has to handle multiple processes
and walk around a fair amount should U- or L-shaped cells be
introduced to reduce the waste of walk time and distance.
Always be thinking as if you were the part: Where would you
want to go next? Would you want to go along a complex route
from receiving to shipping, or would you prefer a simple path
from supplier to customer?

Maintainability was the last topic brought up. The previous generation
of A1 machines was infamous among the maintenance staff for being
hard to keep running. Gauges and oil points were located all over the
machines, and there was no set schedule for preventive maintenance.
Struggling with this culture, the A1 team decided to take the first step
and at least make the visual aspects of maintenance accessible to the
staff from one place on the machine’s rear side.

Yoshina took a hard look at the material that had been presented to
him and seemed pleased. While he did not think that everything
would go according to plan without countermeasures for issues that
would arise throughout the process, he did reaffirm the team’s funda-
mental philosophy, which underpinned each decision they had made.
Yoshina Meets with the X10 Team
The X10 team had a different view of Yoshina. It seemed everyone
was of the opinion that his presence was a distraction from their
more immediate deadlines. They politely listened to his ideas but
then went about making decisions using more traditional criteria—
mostly short-term cost.

They presented their ideas to Yoshina, beginning by touting the cost
savings they were projecting by ordering jigs from a local company
instead of the machine builder. The purchasing leader for the X10
product family identified an 8 percent up-front cost savings by using
a local jig maker. In addition, the close proximity of the jig maker to