Copying Toyota's Past Practices or Toyota's Thinking?
With our Lean efforts, it’s always good to ask, are we:
- Copying Toyota’s past methods,
- Copying Toyota’s current methods OR
- Copying Toyota’s thought process and concepts
If you’re a regular Lean Blog reader, you’ll know that I’d argue
for doing #3. The real power of Lean is in the mindset and the
thinking processes. Part of the risk of #1 is that you’re chasing a
moving target, since Toyota is always innovating (and kaizening).
What’s documented formally somewhere is probably out of date and
might not represent what Toyota is doing today (#2).
Here’s an example that illustrates this perfectly, I think. A
major company (which will remain nameless) has a “Toyota Production
System” initiative and they are moving away from their
long-standing practice of “kitting” parts for
assembly operators. They always kitted because of the parts
variability and that doing line-side storage would be very complex.
It just seemed to make sense for their business.
Part of their new TPS initiative is to move away from kitting (which they
called “muda,” in their attempts to be like Toyota). OK, it’s
waste, but is that waste worse than the tradeoffs that come with
NOT kitting? The company was very proud of their attempts to be
like Toyota. It wasn’t clear what the benefits were, to the
customer, the employee, or the company, but they were proud. They
also showed a video that demonstrated the Toyota types of waste,
but it was pretty superficial and seemed somewhat offbase in a
couple of ways. They were trying really hard to use the lingo, but
the thinking didn’t seem to be there, or at least it wasn’t very
advanced TPS type thinking.
Well, right AFTER that speaker, we had a speaker from Toyota
Logistics Services in Oregon. They talked about how they
basically kitted parts for workers who were customizing/finalizing
Toyota products instead of doing line-side storage. Line-side
storage would take 30% more space, the presenter said, so kitting
was better. Line-side storage would bring the waste of added space,
which would have led to more motion for parts delivery and probably
more motion in picking parts.
Plus, you might remember this article about the
new Toyota San Antonio plant and how they have moved to kitting
parts.
So why this other company was so opposed to kitting is beyond me.
It’s not “anti-TPS” to kit parts. You have to think through those
tradeoffs for what makes sense to your own company. What minimizes
overall total waste? What better supports your employees? Which is
better for quality and flow? If the other company moved to
line-side storage because they really had analyzed all
alternatives, then OK. But, it sure seemed like they were blindly
copying Toyota… and copying the Toyota of the past instead of the
Toyota of today.
What do you think? Have you personally looked at this tradeoff
between kitting and line-side storage?
