Page 71 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

data like the seasonally adjusted rate of sales. Most team
members had no idea. The general manager told us, “I
already took a pay cut eight months ago and we kept
that to ourselves . . . but now we are going to have to ask
everybody to cut back a little bit so we can keep every-
body working.” That’s when it really registered that they
were really serious about job security.

The stark reality of the fall in demand and what it meant for
everyone at the plant immediately led to an intensified focus on
cost reduction by team members. In most companies, it is rare
for an hourly employee to even see data on cost, and often, as a
matter of policy, management does not want these employees to
know the real costs. At TMMK, team members used the metrics
boards posted in every area of the plant—normally mostly fo-
cused on quality and safety kaizen projects—to find opportuni-
ties to save money. Another structure for kaizen is quality circles,
which at TMMK are organized voluntarily by hourly employees
on paid overtime. The circles use TBP to solve bigger problems
then they can handle during a normal day when they are working
production. Steve Turley, a 13-year veteran hourly team member
who was assigned full time to organize quality-circle activities in
assembly, told us:

In the past we were more focused in quality circles on
quality or safety, but with the recession cost jumped
right up along with that. We looked at things like re-
ducing scrap and repairs. We could go through our logs
to find where we had the most scrap or scratches, and
maintenance logs on when they were coming out to fix
something, and see the costs associated with that.

40