Page 78 - Toyota Under Fire

THE OIL CRISIS AND THE GREA T RECESSION

TMMI brought down defects from 150 to 31 defects per 100
vehicles. By the middle of 2009, it had broken through the 20
defects per 100 threshold and was performing as well as or bet-
ter than its Japanese counterparts. When TMMI started building
Highlanders in the fall of 2009 on the line that had been shut
down, it was able to keep this quality record intact.
Bringing fundamental skills to a new level was another area
of focus for TMMI’s downtime activities. Before the recession,
the paint department had developed a unique training program
for team members. Training for a job on a Toyota assembly line
means becoming deeply familiar with the standardized work for
the job and practicing the necessary steps. Classes of jobs like
paint, welding, and assembly have been analyzed, and fundamen-
tal skills that apply broadly across those jobs have been identified.
The fundamental skills training process begins with performing
simulated tasks at artificial workstations (e.g., learning to apply
caulk to a welded car body), followed by performing the task on a
stationary mock-up of a vehicle, and finally working on a moving
mock-up, but not an actual car. The paint department at TMMI
had taken this standard approach to training a step further. It cre-
ated an assembly-line loop out of spare parts, one that was big
enough to move real vehicles around so that team members could
practice the standardized work on real cars. One of the assembly
departments had already built a similar training loop to simulate
assembly jobs before the shutdown.
During the downturn, the full-size training loops were made
available to all departments to train for the launch of the High-
lander. This was one of the reasons why the plant was able to
launch production with so few defects.
That was not the only way in which the focused training
and kaizen activities paid off. TMMI also began setting new

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