Page 241 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

improve the company’s operations. The application of kaizen
mind is what led to the actions that Toyota took.
Toyota repeatedly attributed the recall crisis to communica-
tion problems, and it is clear that the process of getting from
customer concerns to concrete action to address those concerns
was anything but lean. One exception was the call center, but
it could not address the real root cause of the problem. What it
could do was provide one of the best sources of data on the real
customer concerns—it could bring the problems to the surface.
Nancy Fein, who was running the call center, discovered that as a
result of the crisis, there was far more interest in the data that the
center was collecting:

We were beginning to coordinate across Toyota to pro-
vide that information and make sure people knew how
to use that information. Before the crisis, it was more of
a push to the organization. Now, there is a very strong
realization everywhere that they need to pull it. People
are asking for our data now. Our product quality depart-
ment uses it, public affairs uses it, sales uses it, the legal
department uses it, and our plants and engineering are
using it for kaizen.

Of course data are only data; they do not solve problems.
The problems have to be solved in design, engineering, sales,
customer support, and manufacturing. As we saw in Chapter 4,
Uchiyamada began bringing Engineering back to the basics. He
was concerned that engineers in Japan were too insulated from
customers and that, as a result, they spent too little time listen-
ing to actual customers: “The previous process was the quality
department would look through that database and find the issues

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