Page 47 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

partners. It means that every Toyota team member must take re-
sponsibility for his actions and their effects on others.
One of the underappreciated facets of TPS is how it feeds into
the Toyota Way and vice versa. It’s one thing to say that the Toyota
culture embraces the spirit of challenge. It’s quite another to make
sure that challenges are perpetually in front of everyone in the
company. TPS deliberately creates a steady flow of challenges. This
might seem odd—most companies have a hard enough time deal-
ing with the challenges presented to them by demanding custom-
ers, evolving markets, and aggressive competitors. But one of the
things that Taiichi Ohno understood about just-in-time produc-
tion was that with so little inventory, there was no room for error.
That’s why standardized work and a systematic problem-solving
process were imperative for the company. When you have inven-
tory on hand, if a machine goes down or a process is operating at
less than full efficiency, you have a buffer. But when you’re operat-
ing in a just-in-time environment throughout the company, any
hiccup rapidly reverberates up and down the production line. That
means that you can’t get by just slapping Band-Aids on problems
or even with “good enough” solutions to a problem. The rest of
the production line depends on problems being solved at the root
cause so that they do not return.
That, in turn, is a driver for kaizen mind. Toyota needs
every employee to always be thinking about how to improve
processes—continuous improvement—just to keep up with the
demands of TPS on a daily basis. Of course, it also requires will-
ingness to “go and see” problems to make continuous improve-
ment a living reality, teamwork so that solutions to problems
work together to create a better whole. All of this, though, ul-
timately requires a culture of respect for employees, no matter
what their level within the company. Executives and “lean

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