Posted on 25-02-2010 at 09:35
Did Toyota lose focus on core lean values such as continuous improvement? Did the company become too focused on lean? Is it possible, as some media reports have suggested, that Toyota's troubles exposed some faults inherent in lean manufacturing?
Lean and quality pundits debate the exact cause of Toyota's safety issues but seemingly agree that the concept of lean manufacturing was not the company's problem. Nothing in the Toyota recalls or hearings are related to lean manufacturing, wrote Jeffrey Liker, author of "The Toyota Way" and University of Michigan professor, in an e-mail. Simply put, "these are product engineering and communications issues," he said.
Similarly, auto industry veteran engineer Frank Murdock says lean isn't necessarily more vulnerable to risk.
"However, just like anything else, when done superficially or incompletely lean processes can get you into big trouble," says Murdock, an adjunct professor of quality systems and project management at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich.,
Murdock and several other experts weighed in on whether lean factored into Toyota's safety issues during an American Society for Quality Web conference on Feb. 22, just two days before Toyota President and CEO Akio Toyoda was scheduled to speak before Congress.
In some instances lean can cause disruptions when companies try to cut waste by reducing safety stock, says Murdock, who worked 28 years as an engineer for Ford Motor Co. and is a senior ASQ member. That could spell trouble for a manufacturer that doesn't have predictable processes, he says.
It was suggested in a Feb. 13 Wall Street Journal article entitled "How Lean Manufacturing Can Backfire" that Toyota became too lean by standardizing parts across different models, setting itself up for a massive recall by repeating the defect in several product lines. But former ASQ president and auto industry veteran Ron Atkinson says the story missed the point of lean
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