Page 199 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

technical details. That obviously played a big role in the way Toy-
ota thought about issues like sticky pedals, which from a strict
engineering standpoint it did not regard as a safety issue.
Meanwhile, interactions with the NHTSA in the United
States were handled by TMA, since regulatory bodies are country
specific, and TMS was the hub for customer data, which it gath-
ered from interactions with customers and dealers. The actual re-
ports to the NHTSA were developed by engineers in Japan who
compiled data from the United States. Ultimately, as we’ve noted,
this gave various parts of Toyota quite different perspectives on
the brewing crisis in the United States and on what response was
necessary. One can imagine the multitude of pathways in this
complex web of organizations through which information had to
travel when there was a customer concern or a request from the
NHTSA.
Before the crisis, this cumbersome organization had never
been a big issue because there was rarely pressure for an imme-
diate and definitive response on safety or quality issues. As Bob
Carter explained: “Being with the company 29 years, if I had a
to-do list of things that needed to change, decentralizing postpro-
duction engineering wouldn’t have been on the first five pages. It
was never an issue. If I look back, I never had a problem with the
decisions we made.”
One of the founding principles of the Toyota Production
System is to keep every process under pressure by eliminating
inventory. When there isn’t pressure, according to Taiichi Ohno,
problems are hidden and are allowed to continue and perhaps
even grow, and that’s what happened here. But then the recall
crisis applied tremendous pressure within a very short period of
time, overstressing the system and leading to a new sense of ur-
gency on the need to change.

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