Toyota way (Part 1)

There are many journals, books and websites to explain Toyota way in broader approach and they provide extensive examples but my objective is to help beginners understand this concept in a simpler and concise way.

I will explain this concept in 3 parts for better understanding.

Generally 14 principles are associated with Toyota way. I really don’t understand why all of them are given in Toyota way (Maybe because there is no TPS way). There are 5 operating principles and other principles are explained in the house of TPS (which will be our next topic). Toyota way is like the heart and TPS is the brain, as I mentioned in my first post. TPS are the tools employed to maintain the integrity of Toyota way and driving force for improvements. I will discuss about these 5 operating principles now. This is the systematic way to go about it. Let's follow the step by step approach.

Maybe this house didn't make much sense in the first post. Let's crack the case now.

Respect for people involves two principles:

Respect and Team work:

Man forms an important factor to any organization. A leader who can effectively control man (which is the only resource that can think) can run an organization efficiently. No two persons think completely alike. Appreciating the common things and respecting the differences keeps the relationship going. One person alone cannot achieve much but a group of people collectively can achieve a lot.

 One of my ex company head always said this “I don't want one person taking 100 steps but 100 people taking one step”. An organization can never grow no matter how much an individual contributes, if a group of people collectively contribute even a little, the results can be amazing!!

I would like to share my own experience in this regard.

After my TPS training, I was asked to take up a theme activity (Jishuken) at one of our vendors and do quality improvement. I was excited about this as I was the leader of the activity. We formed the team and the team comprised of inter-disciplinary departments. Following are the steps of any theme based activity.

1.      Select theme

2.      Grasp present condition and identify weak areas

3.      Set target

4.      Analyze the causes and implement countermeasures

5.      Check results

6.      standardize the solution

7.      Reflect on the process

I don’t want to go in depth into these steps as theme based activity is considered to be the last step of TPS. This is just for your understanding and I will explain these activities in case studies separately in the future. I will continue with my story.

As the activity leader, I gave individual tasks to the members and asked them to close the issues. I didn't want to explain the whole activity to each of them as I wanted only me to get all the credits (I learned this mistake very soon, few people don't understand this, I pity them). They completed the activity assigned to them but when we reached the step 5, we hadn't made any progress. I was bewildered.

Root cause:

They made every possible effort to ensure that their individual process doesn't produce any defect. When a holistic analysis was made, defects were made in the previous process or in the subsequent process which they had obviously overlooked as they were busy improving their own process. These sorts of activities are prevalent even to this day. Results cannot be achieved by individual contribution alone. Everything is interdependent in an organization and team work is the only way to make a progress. Now read respect and team work in the above house and analyze the problem by your self.

Individual growth doesn't ensure company's growth always and in the long term an individual will definitely fail trying this approach but working in a team towards the company's growth will definitely ensure individual's growth in the long term.

Team work works!!