Toyota's Committment to People

Toyota’s plunge into big pickups veers into a Texas-size ravine -
USATODAY.com

I’ve
already written about this before, but there was a new article
in USA Today about Toyota’s commitment to its workers in San
Antonio, even during a slow down in the truck market (and in truck
production).

Now, about 2,000 permanent employees draw a paycheck
from a plant that doesn’t produce anything. They perform
maintenance, talk about ways to improve quality, and relearn tasks
as basic as the best way to drive a bolt.

Toyota has the financial strength to do this. I’m sure it has
nothing to do with P.R. or being philanthropic. I’m sure keeping
the workers on and training them (with real work, not just letting
them sit in the cafeteria) is all about the long-term good of the
company. Many of Toyota’s suppliers (certainly part of the TPS
sphere of influence) are not keeping their workers on — probably
because they don’t have the balance sheet to allow that?

They’re luckier than the plant’s 200 temporary workers
who work as needed and an army of employees at its parts suppliers,
who have been furloughed.

I wonder if Toyota would consider sponsoring similar quality
training and TPS training for the suppliers’ employees, expecting
that to also help improve Toyota quality in the long run? Or does
that just get to be too much of an expense?

There were some comments from Jeff Liker in the article, he
said:

“If they laid off San Antonio workers for
three months, that would be the shot heard ’round the world,” says
Jeffrey Liker, a University of Michigan professor whose The
Toyota Way and other books on Toyota’s production system have
become business best sellers.

If the training program for the San Antonio
plant stoppage works, the result could be workers with higher
skills and more loyalty, lowering the plant’s costs in the
future.

It also is building a reservoir of local
good will.

“If I were in Texas, I think any sane person
would say, ‘The market is awful, and this crazy company is actually
keeping people employed,’ ” Liker says.

So what are the workers doing during this production stoppage?
There’s a bit more detail in the article:

There’s plenty for workers to do while not
making trucks, Toyota officials insist. In the press to get
production started, many new hires never were fully steeped in
Toyota methods. Trainers now can make sure workers are
knowledgeable about best practices, says Toyota spokesman Mike
Goss.

Those can be as simple as the best way to
drive bolts with an impact wrench, a process some workers may
repeat thousands of times a day.

They might practice picking up five at a
time in the exact configuration for each to be driven most
efficiently.

That’s an amazing level of detail for their
“standardized work,” the exact way to pick up and hold the bolts.
I’m impressed that Toyota can have both such attention to detail
AND a long-term view. Are they perfect? No! They really misjudged
the market for trucks (and they’ve had quality problems that have
popped up along the way) — as Jim Womack pointed out in the
article, they’re far from perfect. But they’re still an interesting
company to watch and to learn from.