Page 215 - Toyota Under Fire
P. 215
TOYOT A UNDER FIRE
for components and various subsystems of the vehicle. In the
past, all the data on customer concerns flowed through the qual-
ity division. A new system has been put in place so that data from
the call center, field technical reports, the NHTSA database, and
various auto-related Web sites will go directly to the engineer re-
sponsible for that part of the car.
Toyota also headed back to its roots in how an engineer is
trained. At Toyota, every manager is supposed to be a teacher in
the traditional sense of the master-apprentice relationship. Origi-
nally, a senior engineer was assigned to act as a mentor for a small
group of about five direct reports through on-the-job develop-
ment. Over time, as the company grew, Toyota could not develop
engineering managers fast enough, so it increased the number of
apprentices reporting to each mentor. A group manager came to
be responsible for developing about 20 engineers. Under Uchi-
yamada, Toyota reversed this decision, adding a role below the
group manager (assistant manager) and moving back toward
the one leader for five junior engineers ratio for daily mentoring
and development. Adding in new layers of management may seem
antithetical to a “lean” approach, but that is based on a com-
mon misunderstanding of lean. The point of lean is not to elimi-
nate steps or middle management, but to eliminate unnecessary and
wasteful steps. Toyota has learned that the 5-to-1 ratio is a necessary
step for developing engineers with the right capabilities and experi-
ence. That’s not a wasteful, but a necessary investment.
In another step to advance vehicle safety generally, Toyota
decided to invest $50 million in a new Collaborative Safety Re-
search Center near its Ann Arbor, Michigan R&D operations. The
new center will take an open-source approach to safety research,
working with partners and sharing insights and results with other
manufacturers or anyone who can use the research. Even the man-
184