Toyota's Production Process

Many companies have tried to understand and replicate the production process at the various Toyota facilities, but until you stop just looking at the surface and take a deeper look you won’t fully understand all the positive aspects to the production line. Toyota is known for their distinctive practices and precision work throughout the years and their amazing use of internal benchmarking to help the company continue to move forward. Because of the positives within the company’s dynamics Toyota has comfortably been on top of other companies in their industry. Toyota is not shy when it comes to show and giving ideas to other manufacturers to improve their own processes, but very few actually accomplish the success that Toyota has. Not because it is too trying to do, but because the manufacturers that come into to evaluate confuse the tools and practices they see on their plant visits with the system itself. The process at Toyota isn’t a process that you can simply look at and understand; you truly have to get a closer look and really dissect it. A study was done to understand the process completely including service functions like equipment, maintenance, workers’ training and supervision. All of these sections were taken into a count because the service functions help and are responsible for the whole process moving the way that it does. Toyota, like other manufacturers has many specifications set to create everything correctly, but only thing that Toyota does to get those specifications where they need to be is using a hypothesis method. It is a rigorous problem solving method, but it has shown to be very beneficial to the company. The article summaries the four rules that they believe to underlie the Toyota production system. Rule 1: How People Work; all work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing and outcome. This rule is implemented well because it doesn’t just target senior workers or supervisors; it is set in place to be