Page 39 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

the exact time it was needed. When problems with serving cus-
tomers were encountered, Deming advocated a highly system-
atic approach to solving them, known as the Plan-Do-Check-Act
(PDCA) cycle.*
The PDCA cycle is fairly intuitive. Before you attempt to
fix a problem, you need to make sure that you have a plan that is
likely to succeed based on thorough study of the root cause of the
problem, not just its symptoms. Once you have a plan for fixing
the root cause, you do the solution in a test environment, check
that the solution works, then act based on what you learn from
the test environment, either improving the plan or moving on to
another area that is in need of improvement. Thus, the PDCA
cycle never ends—the final step always points to opportunities
for further improvement.
The Toyota problem-solving process, known first as “practical
problem solving,” has evolved to today’s version, called Toyota Busi-
ness Practices (TBP). It is Toyota’s approach to solving problems,
from eliminating errors in individual jobs to setting the global
strategy of the company
In summary, the TBP process begins with a statement of the
problem, including the gap between the actual and the ideal con-
ditions. This gap is then broken down into the most important
problems that can be acted upon. These specific subproblems are
then analyzed by asking “why?” until the root cause, not a surface
cause, is found. Within Toyota, this is known as the Five Whys—
the belief that to find the root cause of a problem, you have to ask
“why” at least five times. Countermeasures are then identified,
tried, and monitored, with further adjustments being made until
the gap is eliminated and the next challenge identified.

* Deming adapted the PDCA cycle from William Shewhart.

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