Page 76 - Toyota Under Fire

THE OIL CRISIS AND THE GREA T RECESSION

Shutting down one of the assembly lines at TMMI (in addi-
tion to the line producing Tundras and Sequoias, TMMI has a
line producing Sienna minivans that continued operations) pre-
sented a huge challenge and opportunity to TMMI’s managers.
The challenge was keeping half the plant staff, roughly 1,800
people, actively engaged while their normal production jobs were
on hold. The opportunity was to match the quality, flexibility,
and cost-effectiveness levels of the best Toyota plants in Japan.
Attacking quality issues is never haphazard or ad hoc at Toyota
plants. Bringing down the rate of defects started with renewed
training in kaizen and TBP to sharpen everyone’s problem-solving
skills before they tackled the daunting task of cutting defects by
more than 80 percent (keep in mind that this was a plant that was
winning industrywide plant quality awards in the United States
at the old level of defects).
Since there were no auditoriums large enough to accommo-
date 1,800 people in training classes, the plant leaders decided to
train team members in their existing work groups and conducted
training in small rooms around the shop floor. Instead of com-
puter projectors, they used flip charts. They needed first to train
the trainers, since all the training was to be done by managers
and group leaders. In truth, this intimate approach worked bet-
ter, since it made the training more accessible and interactive and
allowed the company to apply concepts to the actual production
floor. It also significantly raised the training skills of the manage-
ment team, a benefit that was very important at Toyota, where
managers are expected to be teachers.
Anyone who has sat through any amount of corporate train-
ing, let alone three months’ worth, may rightly ask how three
months of training will cut costs and improve quality. After all,
training exercises that have no concrete goals attached quickly

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