Toyota's Key Document For Quality Characteristics

particularly the main spindle, causing roughness issues, broken tools, premature wear on the spindle, and broken tool holders. This placed a burden on the associates, as overtime was needed to make shipments. This also caused quality issues at the customer, where the above issues mentioned were also found. The stress placed on the associates to improve and send quality to the customer was demoralizing. Many asked for transfers from the line and associates for off the line needed to be trained just to give the customers a break. I knew that just measuring the parts from a blueprint standpoint and measuring the parts were not going to get this line better nor do anything to improve morale. I went to the supervisor of the line and spoke to him
After identifying critical characteristics and writing an inspection standard (Toyota’s Key Document for Quality Characteristics), I went to the existing line to see what controls could be put in place for safety and regulatory dimensions. Marked those critical areas on a process map and worked with production engineering to install the proper quality tools to control the process, like an airbag tester and a DC nutrunners to control torque (torque is considered a safety critical by Toyota). I made small requests to gauge the responses of the supplier team, but worked on the larger tasks myself. Toyota came in during the first trial, which was an epic failure, and made it clear that they were not satisfied with the process at hand. At this point, the contract supplier was receiving as much blame as my company, but still did not want to invest the time or manpower to assist in improving. We had problems with assembly, the finished product was not visually acceptable, and we had supplier issues with
I requested to my contract supplier that if I could make assembly easier and make a better finished product, could I have some assistance with suppliers, train associates on the line, and adjust the pitch timing for each station; they agreed. I started with the supplier quality supervisor and put together a list of the supplier components that we had issues with during the build. Corrective actions were written and go and see activities were done by the supervisor and me. After this activity was completed, I then called my prototype group and design engineer, brought them to the contract supplier and had them work with the contract supplier on pitch alignment and issues with the seat. Slowly I began to gain their trust and willingness to participate in team activities. I conducted meetings for station alignment and seat improvement. With the contract supplier and prototype group making recommendations, we were able to balance out the line times to make the line run smoother and maximize the amount of inspection at each station. The design engineer and contract supplier were able to make changes to the trim cover of the seat to minimize wrinkles while making assembly easier for associates. While these were the major changes that were completed, I would like to report that the seat project I worked on captured the highest in seat quality in the Mass Market Midsize/Large Car segment (Toyota Camry assembled at