Saturday, April 6, 2013

Toyota's SECRET weapon...

The Toyota Way has been studied by many people and companies.  The aim has been to find that secret weapon that has given the company its edge.

In fact, Toyota has always been very welcome in inviting other companies, even its competitors, to visit its plants and examine its famous production processes, the TPS (Toyota Production System).

What we see as a result of these investigations is a discovery of many Toyota production management tools, such as kaizen, kanban, hijunka, etc.  These are then being brought back to the visiting companies and are implemented in the hope of achieving positive improvements.  However, often times, for various reasons, either the intended results are not achieved, or the results are only ephemeral.  

Based on my observations, Toyota's real secret weapon is not the production tools that the world is already very knowledgeable of.   Toyota's real secret weapon, is its people management.

What I mean by that is: it has the ability to have all its Team Members commit to doing what is planned to be done.  That is, the company strategy and its execution are able to flow from top to bottom.   This way, it makes the "cause" and "effect" relationship to be seen clearly and, most importantly, predictably, and any necessary fine-tuning can be done swiftly and with the predicted results.  Most other companies, on the other hand, have the difficulty that the flow stops somewhere in the middle, thus not everyone is acting in accordance to the plan.  As a result, there are variabilities.  This creates headache for management to not be able to find the true root causes of problems.

Toyota's people management ability, though, has lost a bit of its edge several years ago when it tried to expand faster than it could train its new team members and managers.


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