Page 44 - Toyota Under Fire

THE MOST ADMIRED COMP ANY IN THE WORLD

misunderstand kaizen. Too often it has come to mean assembling
a special team to tackle a discrete improvement project, or per-
haps organizing a kaizen “event” for a week to make a burst of
changes. At Toyota, kaizen isn’t a set of projects or special events.
It’s the way people in the company think at the most fundamen-
tal level, harking back to Deming’s never-ending PDCA cycle.
There are two types of kaizen. The first is maintenance kai-
zen, the daily work of dealing with an unpredictable world. Main-
tenance kaizen is the process of reacting to the inevitable (some
might call it Murphy’s Law) mistakes, breakdowns, changes, and
variations of everyday life in order to meet today’s expected stan-
dard (for productivity, quality, cost, and safety).
Visitors to Toyota plants are often surprised by the high level
of activity—including the responses to the frequent pull of an
andon cord by team members on the production line throughout
the plant at the first sign of any out-of-standard conditions. This
intense activity and the problem solving that results is largely
maintenance kaizen. Since these problems have the potential to
shut down the line, maintenance kaizen is urgent and immediate,
with the goal of bringing conditions back to the standard.
The second type of kaizen is improvement kaizen. This is the
work of not just maintaining standards but raising the bar. Toy-
ota inculcates in all employees the idea that the goal is perfection,
and therefore that every process can be improved.
One of the core misunderstandings is how much effort Toy-
ota puts into improvement kaizen on a daily basis. Many outsid-
ers expect Toyota to have perfected most of its processes—after
decades of kaizen, there can’t be much room left for improve-
ment, they reason. Fighting this perception, even among Toyota
employees, is perhaps one of the reasons that “kaizen mind” is
a core value of Toyota. You can’t maintain the gains from a lean

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