That said, the idea of Toyota taking TPS from its shop floor and disseminating it elsewhere is not a radically new idea for the company. “The backdrop to all this is President Toyoda’s extremely strong sense of crisis.” “We want to systematically go over every step in our processes-from R&D to manufacturing, sales and servicing-in order to raise the combat effectiveness of our business as a whole,” Tomoyama told Bloomberg in an interview early last year. As president of Toyota Connected Corp., as well as a Toyota executive vice president, Tomoyama is intimately engaged with Toyota’s transformational efforts.
The task of the group, according to its then-leader Shigeki Tomoyama, was to evaluate how TPS’ core concepts, such as continuous improvement, could be applied to the company’s newer businesses, such as car-sharing and connected vehicles. TPS in Every Corner of the BusinessĪt Toyota, TPS is simply how the company operates, and about a year ago the automaker introduced a newly created TPS group to “consolidate the strengths of Toyota, with an aim to improve productivity in areas outside of production by promoting the Toyota Production System in such areas.” As for automotive, even more true,” added a lean and continuous improvement engineer with Sandia National Laboratories. “Profound would be an understatement! If you’re not doing TPS as a manufacturer, you’ll soon be out of business. “ has forced all players to dramatically improve,” adds consultant and IndustryWeek contributor Robert Simonis. “TPS is the breakthrough philosophy for manufacturers and service industries who want to excel and be relevant far into the future.” In the past three decades, the Toyota Production System has become the benchmark of manufacturers worldwide,” wrote Terry Spalding, continuous improvement manager at Hansen Plastics, with past leadership positions across a range of manufacturing operations. “I’ve been in the manufacturing sector my entire career. Here are just a few comments gleaned from a LinkedIn request for comment on the influence of TPS: As well, the root of lean manufacturing is the Toyota Production System. TPS has been the model for countless other manufacturing companies’ production systems, both inside and outside of automotive. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of the Toyota Production System on manufacturing well beyond Toyota. That means building quality into the manufacturing process and improving productivity by making only, in the company’s own words, “what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed.” Additionally, the philosophy of daily continuous improvements is inextricably intertwined in TPS. But also, and significantly, by going back to what got it there.Īnd for Toyota, what got it there is the Toyota Production System, or TPS-the vaunted production system developed by Toyota to make vehicles to customer order as quickly and as efficiently as possible by eliminating waste.
So how is Toyota addressing this “once-in-a-century profound transformation”? Certainly, like every other auto and technology company that wants to own this space-by leaping into all the new stuff. “With even our rivals and the rules of competition also changing, a life-or-death battle has begun in a world of unknowns.” “The automotive industry is now hurtling into an era of profound transformation, the likes of which come only once every 100 years,” Toyoda said during a press conference that coincided with the automaker’s last fiscal year-end. He’s talking about rapid-fire advances in technology-automotive electrification, vehicle connectivity that is growing by leaps and bounds to full autonomy, the advent of car-sharing versus car-owning-as well as new competitors from the Googles of the world who are outside of automotive altogether. Not about merely winning or losing, says the grandson of the founder of Toyota Motor Corp., but a battle for survival. President Akio Toyoda has made no secret of just how radical the changes are he sees sweeping the automotive industry. If you’re Toyota, you jump right in, you revisit the basics and you pump up the speed.
What do you do when immense changes are sweeping your industry at a pace never experienced before? When you’re facing competitors never before on the radar? When you’re an industrial giant that’s experienced huge success, to such a degree that the eyes of other industrial giants are glued to how you get things done?
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