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The Toyota Way

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131–140 of 227 posts

Re: The Toyota Way

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kiichiro Toyoda invented the lean production model after coming to the states and studying the inefficiencies of the assembly lines of Ford. See also Deming on quality control: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Work_in_Japa...

As I’ve heard it, Deming was having trouble getting people to listen to him on this side of the pond, but the Japanese were all too happy to listen to his ideas. There also seems to be a running disagreement about whether Mr Toyoda or Taiichi Ohno is responsible for the Toyota system. To wit, the intro to Ohno’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiichi_Ohno

> As I’ve heard it, Deming was having trouble getting people to listen to him

made me chuckle - its not like he did anything of value...

Deming has always been a reminder to think about counter tendencies. He might not have made sense to the Detroit execs in 1950-1975 but his relevance changed sharply after that.

Re: The Toyota Way

#132
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely unrelated but... I was listening to the "The Rocky Road to Dublin" when reading your comment during the "hunt the hare" part. Funny coincidence.

Which version? The Dubliners recording (with Luke Kelly singing) is one of my favorite songs of all time.

This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxBKgOyMzSc

Edit:

Although this one is pretty good too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdbeM2JWYE

Re: The Toyota Way

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe you were pressing both

From what I understand, the computer will (and should) reject the acceleration attempt in favor of the brake. But, if you own a reasonably modern vehicle, try it :)

If this were true people wouldn't be able to do burnouts in auto transmissions cars?

Re: The Toyota Way

#134
post #117
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incorrect by an order of magnitude. Lexus sells in excess of half a million cars per year.

I stand corrected. Having performed some cursory 'research' I found that in the USA in 2018, according to https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2018-full-year-usa-... All Lexus vehicles combined sold 92,660 units versus the 4Runner model which sold 139,694 units. A difference of 47,000 units, or roughly, the 2018 US sales for the Lexus ES

At a guess the USA is not the primary market for Lexus.

Re: The Toyota Way

#135
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cases of unintended acceleration, in all brands of cars, are due to the foot coming down on the wrong pedal. And then in a panic, your brain refuses to acknowledge the error and doubles down. Your memory gets based on what your brain thought, and not what actually happened. US government estimates are that this happens an average of around 16k times per year in the USA. The press release that Wikipedia cites for…

I'm sorry but you are wrong regarding the Toyota problem. There was (is?) a firmware issue that caused the vehicle to attempt to speed up, regardless of if the accelerator was pressed, or even if the brake was pressed. In my case, I had the brake fully depressed with around 100kg of force, and the engine was revving to attempt to overcome the brake (VERY scary situation, believe me!). The system only recovered when I…

First, my main point remains. Most cases of unintended acceleration are human error, regardless of whether any specific case is. I am sorry that you experienced the contrary. But it doesn't change the overall figures.

Second, Toyota dragged its feet on the full variety of problems that they had. But the one that they first acknowledged was the floor mat. As https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/toyota-pay-12b-hiding-deadly-... says, At the time of the first ABC News report, Toyota attempted to assure its drivers that the incidents of sudden acceleration without warning were solely caused by floor mats becoming stuck on the gas pedals or driver error.

Re: The Toyota Way

#136

Whenever I see articles like this, I like to remind people that a great production system doesn't make a company more honest or accountable. Unintended acceleration flaw in Toyota models around 2005 to 2011, due to firmware bugs: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... Great for USA customers. They were made whole. I personally was driving a 2011 Toyota minivan in Thailand in 2013 when I suffe…

Weirdest thing, a colleague had unintended acceleration in a Toyota 4WD of much older vintage, 80s or early 90s. Must have been something different entirely, those things were much more mechanical in nature.

Cars of that vintage still had cable operated throttle bodies which could stick for a number of reasons.

Re: The Toyota Way

#137
post #94

Why don't software professionals defer more to the likes of Nintendo, Konami, and other Japanese software companies rather than this manufacturing process?

Are those companies known for their speed and quality of code delivery? Have they published studies and popularised their approaches? Have they, or anyone else, generalized their approaches to things other than specific software categories? The thing about the manufacturing processes that have come out of Toyota (and others), or the ideas from Deming, Goldratt, and others, is that they're more about general systems t…

Nintendo releases more software than Toyota

Re: The Toyota Way

#138
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

W. Deming also played a pretty large role too[1]. The whole history around Lean/Kaizen/etc is pretty fascinating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Do you have some links for the history? I'm interested in Lean and Kaizen. Made a comment about it in this thread.

It's covered a little in the TAL episode on NUMMI[1]. There's also a bit of it involved with TWI[2][3]. I'd read some other interesting things about skill transfer post-WW2 with the Marshall Plan but having trouble finding the original source material.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry#Post_...

[3] https://twi-institute.org/training-within-industry/history/

Re: The Toyota Way

#139
post #117
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incorrect by an order of magnitude. Lexus sells in excess of half a million cars per year.

I stand corrected. Having performed some cursory 'research' I found that in the USA in 2018, according to https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2018-full-year-usa-... All Lexus vehicles combined sold 92,660 units versus the 4Runner model which sold 139,694 units. A difference of 47,000 units, or roughly, the 2018 US sales for the Lexus ES

92,660 is the total for Lexus cars, not vehicles; total Lexus US sales from that chart is 298,310.

Re: The Toyota Way

#140
post #26

>Principle 5 Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time. Quality takes precedence (Jidoka). Any employee in the Toyota Production System has the authority to stop the process to signal a quality issue. I heard culturally Japan and to an extent other Asian manufacturing nations would never actually press the button. Can anyone confirm this?

If you can get your hands on the HBS case study of TPS it's a great read. Details how much emphasis is put on blaming any/all issues on process, rather than people. To the extent that if a clumsy worker drops a wrench, it is assumed to be a problem with process, not that worker, and addressed immediately. The case study also describes a couple of examples of assembly line workers pulling the stop levers and how manag…

Is this it?

https://hbr.org/1999/09/decoding-the-dna-of-the-toyota-produ...

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