Fast Company Toyota Article
No Satisfaction at Toyota
What drives Toyota?
The presumption of imperfection--and a distinctly American refusal to accept it.
From: Issue 111 | December/January | Page 82 | By: Charles Fishman | Photographs By: Spencer Heyfron
Deep inside Toyota's (NYSE:TM) car factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, is the paint shop, where naked steel car bodies arrive to receive layers of coatings and colors before returning to the assembly line to have their interiors and engines installed. Every day, 2,000 Camrys, Avalons, and Solaras glide in to be painted one of a dozen colors by carefully programmed robots.
In the Works Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, assembly plant is its largest outside of Japan. It makes a half-million cars a year--one every 27 seconds.
Finish Line: A worker does final inspection. Toyota's assembly lines make thousands of changes a year to how the work is done.
Georgetown's paint shop is vast and crowded, but in two places there are wide areas of open concrete floor, each the size of a basketball court. The story of how that floor space came to be cleared--tons of equipment dismantled and removed--is really the story of how Toyota has reshaped the U.S. car market.
It's the story of Toyota's genius: an insatiable competitiveness that would seem un-American were it not for all the Americans making it happen. Toyota's competitiveness is quiet, internal, self-critical. It is rooted in an institutional obsession with improvement that Toyota manages to instill in each one of its workers, a pervasive lack of complacency with whatever was accomplished yesterday.
The result is a startling contrast to the car business. At a time when the traditional Big Three are struggling, Toyota is thriving. Just this year, Ford (NYSE:F) and GM (NYSE:GM) have terminated 46,000 North American employees. Together, they have announced the closing of 26 North American factories over the next five years. Toyota has never closed a North American factory; it will open a new
What drives Toyota?
The presumption of imperfection--and a distinctly American refusal to accept it.
From: Issue 111 | December/January | Page 82 | By: Charles Fishman | Photographs By: Spencer Heyfron
Deep inside Toyota's (NYSE:TM) car factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, is the paint shop, where naked steel car bodies arrive to receive layers of coatings and colors before returning to the assembly line to have their interiors and engines installed. Every day, 2,000 Camrys, Avalons, and Solaras glide in to be painted one of a dozen colors by carefully programmed robots.
In the Works Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, assembly plant is its largest outside of Japan. It makes a half-million cars a year--one every 27 seconds.
Finish Line: A worker does final inspection. Toyota's assembly lines make thousands of changes a year to how the work is done.
Georgetown's paint shop is vast and crowded, but in two places there are wide areas of open concrete floor, each the size of a basketball court. The story of how that floor space came to be cleared--tons of equipment dismantled and removed--is really the story of how Toyota has reshaped the U.S. car market.
It's the story of Toyota's genius: an insatiable competitiveness that would seem un-American were it not for all the Americans making it happen. Toyota's competitiveness is quiet, internal, self-critical. It is rooted in an institutional obsession with improvement that Toyota manages to instill in each one of its workers, a pervasive lack of complacency with whatever was accomplished yesterday.
The result is a startling contrast to the car business. At a time when the traditional Big Three are struggling, Toyota is thriving. Just this year, Ford (NYSE:F) and GM (NYSE:GM) have terminated 46,000 North American employees. Together, they have announced the closing of 26 North American factories over the next five years. Toyota has never closed a North American factory; it will open a new