CHAPTER 3

THE ROLE OF MANAGEMENT: ENABLE YOUR EMPLOYEES TO DO THE WORK WELL

In order to delegate and give authority, develop people who can be delegated to and be given authority.

To All You Managers Out There

When I ask Japanese managers at various companies, “What is your role?” most of them will say, “To harness the efforts of all employees to reach the goals of the department, and to improve the safety, quality, timing, and cost of the area given to me,” or something similar.

This may be something that is unique to Japan. Most people who work at Western companies have job descriptions, so when you ask them what their role is, they will respond with their job description. It will be hard to find a group of managers who will all respond the same way the Japanese managers do.

In a typical Japanese company, each department will direct more effort toward the areas that are not meeting their monthly improvement goals, and everyone will work to reach the goals in all the categories. Every company is competing, so rather than focusing on the process of kaizen or what was done, the results become the most important thing. I think that is why most Japanese managers—from those higher up to the supervisors—will respond the same way.

The interesting thing is that even though we are all governed by objectives and goals, if a problem occurs, Japanese managers will have no issues with going beyond their bounds of responsibility to help out and deal with the problem. People may think that the spirit of helping one another, having strong teamwork, and caring for one another are all relics of the past and are not found anymore. This spirit may have declined, but in most Japanese companies, it is still very much the norm and is fostered. So the fact that “my role” is not clear actually helps these firms achieve their targets.

When I was at Toyota, we all had to go through managerial training. Most of this training, however, was very general. In theory, it could be used everywhere, but if memory serves me right, that generality didn’t really match the needs of each individual work area, and so the usefulness of the training was rather limited.

A manager in Toyota’s production area is working in the environment of the Toyota Production System, without extra inventory and in a very fast flow. If a problem arises, within moments he may shut down his department, other departments, and even the entire assembly factory. That kind of environment requires a fast resolution, and so one has to know who to call for what issue beforehand.

Most of the managers believed that they should go to the gemba to see whether the inventory in process and between processes was correct, and whether people were working to the standard method. They also believed that they needed to invest time in eliminating areas where defects could happen.

When a problem that would seriously affect multiple departments arose, the affected departments would be notified, and they would work together on a temporary stopgap. The estimated effect and when the fix would be completed would be reported to the managers. During this time, the managers would also be working with the team to limit the damage that the problem would cause.

Managers and supervisors were always dealing with risk, so without knowing it, they were playing their role as managers in a Toyota Production System environment or in a flowing workplace. The principles were being developed in the production system, and the company culture was being created. A structure that allows people to see and feel that they are successful and are working in a line that is connected to many parts is key to developing good supervisors and managers.

I think we can see how important the structure or logic of the production system is. In a line like this, managers who can make improvements, do good risk management, ensure fast recovery after failures, and create a vibrant workplace are developed.

I feel that we need to have a general definition of a manager who can work in the Toyota Production System environment. Here are the three different management roles that I find especially important. These roles ensure that managers are looking at things from a different perspective that leads to more effective solving of issues.

Managers Are There to Create an Environment in Which Increases in Flow Happen

In most Japanese companies, the word manager is understood to refer to:

1. Assigning jobs and tasks to people

2. Checking those jobs and tasks

3. Having the person redo them if they weren’t done right

Basically, the manager has the people under her bring her work that has been completed, checks it in different ways, and sometimes stops the job if necessary. I think many people believe that this kind of “checking” function is the manager’s main job. Many managers also feel this way and are motivated to work long hours as checkers and verifiers.

I think the reason for this is that we (the Japanese) translated the words manage and manager as “control” and “controller.” Translating it as “control” leads to “check and verify,” but this is not what the real job of a manager is. The word manage has an element of “to do something well or easily,” so “managing” means “doing something well and easily.” One could say that the definition of a manager is “one who makes people do their job well in an easy way.”

Managers get results from the work their people do. The manager’s role is not to check people’s work, but rather to liberally spend time seeing how people can do their work faster, more easily, and more accurately. The manager in the Toyota Production System workplace has to focus on the most important thing to help those who are adding value. That is the elimination of waiting, transportation, and inspection and increasing the ratio of processing to other activities—in other words, creating flow. The role of the manager is to create an environment in which flow can advance for the people who work there. What do we mean by “an environment in which flow can advance”?

We’re not asking the manager to think up new equipment or new jigs and get someone to make them—although that would be helpful, it will be a lot faster to do it within the current organization structure, since we want to develop people as much as possible within that existing structure.

The more important thing is to create a structure in which people can actually think about and ponder the strategy set by management, plan its implementation, and actually carry it out in a concrete way. We need to develop a group that can take improvement ideas. If that group can make the ideas that are given to them by the shop floor concrete quickly and by themselves, then a lot more ideas will be forthcoming from the shop floor. That, in turn, will create an action-oriented work environment that will definitely move in the direction of flow.

One mistake that people often make is feeling that you can just make the plan and then wait for the reports to come in. What’s required is that you check to make sure people can carry it out. If they don’t understand, think of better ways to explain it. If you don’t get the results you wanted, then you may have to get into the thick of things and work up a sweat on the shop floor yourself.

Here are some examples of concrete actions that you as a manager can take to increase flow in your area.

• If processes are physically separated, move them together and do one-piece flow between them.

• Keep adding machines to the flow until you can make a complete finished good in a one-piece flow.

• Make a first-in, first-out finished goods storage and when what is necessary for today’s production has been made, stop the line.

• Do the same thing for other part manufacturing lines.

To learn how to join lines and processes, please read Ohno’s teachings in Lesson 6 of Chapter 1: “The Foreman or Leader Is the One Who ‘Breaks’ the Standard.” When Ohno was able to reduce the headcount of the production line by making improvements, he took out the best person, who then helped join the processes of the next line. As they kept increasing the flow between processes, they freed up more people, who then became the “catching bowl” for all the kaizen ideas.

First, take your time and really build up the first line. Once you start moving to other lines, you may find that some people can now make simple equipment. The kaizen team and the line leader will get more excited and have more ability to perform with every new line you add. They actually start looking forward to coming to work. Up to this point, however, they do need the support and help of management.

We are building up an environment in which flow can advance step by step. The next major step is to give management responsibility and authority to the areas that have improved their performance. Issues that a manager in a production environment has to deal with are always popping up. Giving up certain management responsibilities makes the manager’s job more efficient and also gives people a chance to increase their skills. Developing people who can be trusted and delegated to and giving them the authority as well makes for a nice action-oriented workplace.

Once flow gets to a certain level, the next big issue is normally stoppages caused by equipment breakdowns. Once you have a line with one-piece flow, whether you like it or not, you’ll notice a lot more equipment problems than you saw before. At this stage, we want to focus our efforts on creating an environment that can accommodate a strong maintenance structure. If every little breakdown results in a stoppage, we will have larger financial problems, so at first, this will mean getting insurance (extra inventory) in the right places to cover for the equipment stoppages. Don’t rush to eliminate inventory. If you do, and a machine breakdown causes the whole line to shut down, the Toyota Production System you are putting in will lose everyone’s support.

In the Toyota Production System, the parts will move many times faster than they do in a typical batch and queue system. In order to keep up with this speed, the most important thing is fast action on equipment problems. I highly encourage you to get this capability in-house instead of relying on contractors.

Another issue that will appear will be the problems of defects. This does not mean that the new system created these problems, but rather that they were always there and people were working on things that were unprofitable and even working up a sweat doing it. Things like reducing the number of setup parts that we have to sacrifice to get the right adjustments can be a great project for our new maintenance team.

Other issues will be that people feel that inventory is moving faster and there may be more part shortages, which will make it seem that problem solving is getting more difficult than it was with the previous way of doing things. (Things are not being processed faster, but since there is less safety stock, it will feel as if they are moving faster.) If we keep solving issues at the speed we used to, it will be too slow. We need to create an environment in which faster problem and issue resolution can take place. Once our maintenance team and structure are in place, we can focus on reducing breakdowns and transportation.

Things You Can Do to Reduce Equipment Breakdowns

• Foundational maintenance training

• Keeping a record of what went wrong and what fixes were put in place

• Reduction of changeover time

• Working on a preventive maintenance schedule

• Understanding the conditions required for good parts

• Understanding how to find issues when they are still small

Things You Can Do to Reduce Transportation

• Joining processes

• Making a replenishment type of line

• Changing the layout

• Reducing the processing time

There will be many jobs that have to be done to create the environment we want, but we can’t do them all at once. Just do one at a time. “Profit comes while pursuing flow” was mentioned in Chapter 1. We could also say that small frequent transportation is like healthy blood, which transports nutrients to the cells and takes away the waste products. We can be quite sure that as we pursue one-piece flow, the blood goes through small capillaries to cells that didn’t get blood before, and naturally things that didn’t start to move start gaining movement ability.

I am sure you will agree with me that rather than having management tell people in detail what is wrong with their areas and how to fix them, it is a lot more motivational for them to fix things on their own while pursuing flow.

I ask managers everywhere to take off their “control” hat and put on their “I make it easy for my people to work” hat, and then work hard at that new job.

Giving Authority: Growing People You Can Empower

A long time ago, the words, “Leave it up to the shop floor” were commonplace. In this kind of workplace, while management was there, it could not exercise any authority over production. If the people in the workplace got offended in any way, then the work would slow down or stop, so the only thing that management in these places could do was “leave it up to the shop floor.”

Also, the skills of the workers weren’t always based on logic or sound engineering, but rather on “making things happen” in the conditions they were given, largely based on experience.

When you leave it up to a supervisor who should not be given authority, sooner or later you run into the following problems:

• The manager soon loses his understanding of the workplace and has to “leave it up to the workers.”

• The manager thinks that she can manage using numbers and graphs and gets out of touch with the actual workplace.

• If the results aren’t forthcoming, people are pushed to make it happen.

• Motivation of the workforce goes down.

• The workplace becomes “weak” or unable to deal with changes.

In other words, we are back to the “olden days” where we had no choice but to leave it up to the “guys who are working there.”

When I talk about “giving authority to the workplace,” I am not talking about going back to the old way of doing things. In a Toyota Production System environment, if you cannot move the authority to make decisions and carry them out to the shop floor or workplace level, many elements will not be able to function properly.

Because of this, we have no choice but to develop supervisors whom we can transfer authority to. The first step is relentless standardization so that we can tell whether something is OK or not OK.

Standardization All the Way

In a production setting, it is practically impossible to have the same conditions for people, things, equipment, jigs and tools, and product at all times. Even equipment wears down and starts changing. It’s hard to see these changes from day to day, isn’t it? The same person may feel fine in the morning, but be under the weather in the afternoon. If he is worrying about something that is taking his mind off work, then the risk of having some kind of problem escalates significantly. The damage from a problem happening won’t be too bad, though, if most of the conditions are within tolerance.

There are many, many change points (things that could change and affect our work) in the workplace, and it is impossible for the supervisor or manager to check up on each one all the time. The best way to combat this situation is to determine standards that have as wide a scope as possible and are as detailed as possible. Here are the main things that we should have standards for.

Standard work. Do the work the way the supervisor decided it should be done.

Work instructions. These are the step-by-step instructions and the key points needed to maintain quality, safety, and speed.

Work explanation sheets. There should be many of these. Complicated jobs like doing a changeover, changing the cutting tools, and doing a quality check all need explanation sheets.

Other Standards

Production control boards

Box for holding the production kanbans

Call for help andon

Marked areas to keep the pallets of raw materials or incoming parts

Marked area for the different finished goods according to product number

Shelves of maintenance spare parts inventory for each machine

The manager’s role is to have the supervisor create standards that will minimize the chances of abnormalities happening. By making this visual, one can see whether the group members are sticking to the standards they made and agreed to. If there is an issue, the manager can call the supervisor using the call andon so that everyone learns, “We stop when we find that something strange is going on.” (Stop when things are abnormal.)

For the supervisor, we have her check to make sure that people are doing the work in the standard way. If they are not, then she teaches them until they understand and makes them do it the standard way. We want to ensure that work is always done in accordance with the agreed-upon standard.

So the first step in transferring authority to the workplace is the creation of standards and the deployment of them using the jidoka (stop and fix) method. This way, both the manager and the supervisor will have the same standards inside their heads. We have now created a structure in which the manager will be able to say, “I have given them full authority, and I know they are doing it the correct way.”

The Supervisor Makes the Standards, Checks to See if the Standards Are Followed, and Teaches People How to Follow the Standards if They Are Not Doing So

Up to now, I have used the word supervisor to mean the leader right under the manager. Underneath the supervisor will be a team leader. As we saw in Ohno’s teachings in Chapter 1, Lesson 6, the role of the team leader is to “break the standard.” I told you the history of how that happened, but since this role is very important, I want to add a few more thoughts concerning it.

Ohno had the best people improve their areas, and when this allowed him to free up a person, he took out those best people and had them do more improvements. These people were not working in the line, but were working with people in the line to improve their area. This is a lot different from the way we use team leaders now. I strongly believe that we need to remember why this position was created in the first place, and no matter what, have a person who can focus on improvement in every workshop.

“People who break the standard” is quite a strong phrase, but it means a group of people who will find a better way of doing things. The team leader is the person who pulls the team together. There is no need to teach someone who has skills and experience. He will know much more about the area than the manager or the supervisor ever will, since he lives with it day after day. So rather than training the team leader in details, the best thing to do is to give him “eyes to see improvement potential.”

For example, make things flow: when things are not flowing, this leads to replacing tools during changeovers and lots of short stoppages in production. Once the reasons for these are identified and eliminated, we can reduce stoppages and increase flow.

• Make the work easier (ergonomics improvement)

• Make things last longer (tools and tooling life)

The team leader is there to break the standards created by the supervisor.

The manager teaches the supervisor how to deal with abnormal situations.

Even though we have now created a stable workplace with jidoka and standard work, we still cannot relax. As I said before, most of the Toyota style is based on replenishment or downstream pull production. There are two types of kanbans: withdrawal and production kanbans. In Toyota, these two types of kanbans are used to join all processes from assembly up to raw materials. The total amount of work in process is far less than that in a traditional batch and queue operation. Also, if one area stops operations and doesn’t pull parts, all the processes before it soon stop. This is taking the jidoka concept into the pull system. (The system alerts people when there is a problem and ceases operation until that problem is solved.)

A defect or problem will soon affect the downstream processes, so the work of a production manager is very demanding. If she were to try to deal with all the issues by herself, there would not be enough time for her to do so. Because of flow and pull and managing with little inventory, the effects of problems in processing or unexpected incidents affect other areas much faster.

A good supervisor will be able to find the problem early and fix it, preventing the damage from having a large effect; however, we can’t simply rely on the skills of the supervisor. Since we are in a pull system, the more pressing thing is that any and all downstream problems are noticed directly by the people working in the area, not by the supervisor or management. When management hears of an issue from the supervisor, the supervisor quite often doesn’t know the full downstream picture at that time. If the supervisor has to wait for a management decision before he can take action, it will be too late.

When the supervisor hears a report from the downstream process about a problem and can confirm that it arose in his area, he will take a quick stopgap measure and at the same time will let management know what he has done as the immediate stopgap and what the effect on the downstream process has been.

If it is a product problem, then the supervisor will have the workers in his area check the quality of the product in finished goods storage. The supervisor himself will go to the manager, let her know what the problem is and what is being done about it, and then go to the downstream process and see how far the defect has flowed downstream. Once the defect is found, then all parts, including the parts in the supervisor’s area, will be collected. Based on the information coming in from the people in his area, the supervisor, along with production scheduling and the downstream process, will decide how they will change the production schedule and manage the new one.

There isn’t much that a supervisor or manager can do by herself, but by teaching people the “standard work in an emergency” and by developing supervisors and managers who can make the right decisions in emergency situations, the group is much better able to deal with these kinds of incidents.

By developing supervisors who can think the same way as the manager, we can feel safe in giving them large areas of control. Teaching the workers what to do when a problem arises and training supervisors to make management decisions is all part of giving authority to the shop floor. In other words, this includes developing supervisors who can have authority delegated to them.

Management training people under them is not the same as having them do things that are outside their authority. It is really working together. As a result, though, what you do together does become “pretraining” for management.

“Delegating authority,” in Ohno’s words, is “putting in sensory perceptions like a nervous system on the shop floor. A shop floor that is changing all the time.”

Sharing “Out of Standard” Information

Managers must not only delegate authority. They must also create an environment where they can understand what is going on in the workplace. This will prevent them from “leaving it up to the guys.” Andon boards, hour-by-hour charts, and a fixed number of kanban cards are all part of a system of sharing information. Some tools are visually displayed. The best use of these tools, however, is to foster communication and discussion between the management and the people working there. Just making things visual is not effective.

For example, the point of the hour-by-hour board is to have the supervisor visit the area once an hour, talk with the people working there about how things are going, thank them and encourage them, and, if there are issues, find out more about them. This short but regular communication becomes a great exchange of information leading to wonderful improvement ideas.

Convenient auto-updating boards do not provide a means of communication. Also, nothing will give you better information from the floor than communicating with the people who are working there. A manager who doesn’t communicate, but just looks at numbers and then says, “We’re not making it,” isn’t going to have many good ideas for improvement.

As a manager, motivate yourself to have conversations about the andons, the kanbans, and the finished goods store. As far as how to work with the finished goods storage is concerned, I will cover it in more detail in the section on making a line that motivates people.

Delegating authority to the workplace means developing supervisors who can be responsible and sharing the information about out-of-scope or abnormal situations.

Management Should Make Workplaces That Motivate People to Work and Sustain the Motivation

The thing that makes the manager happiest is having workers who are motivated to excel. What kind of management is needed to sustain this high motivation? Thinking, reading, getting training, fair evaluations, the right motivation scheme, feeling that one is growing, and being praised when they do well are all important. It’s easy to say, but getting everyone to feel this way is very difficult.

I used to talk to people in a kindly way, shoot the breeze with them, and ask them, “Is there anything related to work that you are struggling with?” You may find this strange, but this “normal” management activity led to a huge mistake that I will never forget.

I was talking to an employee who was checking parts at the quality assurance station, and I asked him, “So is the time required for adjusting the machine after the changeover getting shorter?” He responded to me very sincerely, and we had a great conversation. I said, “Thank you,” and left the place, but in the afternoon of that day, we had a defect from the area where this person was working.

This is just my guess, but this employee was probably not used to being talked to and was wondering whether he had answered my questions correctly or in the right way. He kept thinking about this, and that was the reason for his mistake. I had tried to be motivational, but I had actually wound up hurting him instead.

When I wrote about how top management should act and that it was OK to look at the workplace but to avoid talking to people, that learning came from this bitter experience. Some people like to get a smile and a punch in the shoulder, but I think it’s best not to treat them too casually.

I also once overheard an engineer who was trying to work on how we could run a different variation of a chassis part through the production line say, “When we have many versions going through the same line and only one version has a design change, I need to test out all versions to see if it will still work. I am working hard, but all the conditions from the old versions don’t make it easy for me to make the line work with the new version. Yes, we can now make a new version, but I was not able to make any improvements on the line,” he complained.

The supervisor also chimed in. “Up to now, the jigs worked with the current production. You know, we forced them to accept the new version, so it really isn’t as easy to use as it should be.” Both the engineer who had to modify the equipment and the supervisor who had to use it were not happy with the extra complexity that they now had to deal with.

If we can understand what makes a production area “motivational” and what type of structure generates motivation, and add good management to that, then the motivation can be sustained. I used to think that good management came first and the motivation of the employees would follow, but I have seen that it is really difficult to sustain doing things that way. I have now come to the conclusion that setting up the area to be motivational comes first. It’s a paradigm shift, much like downstream pull is a shift from the push method.

I then asked myself, “What are the conditions needed in a motivational workplace?” It’s one in which everyone is thinking, “I can do this job better than anyone else, and I want people to notice it and to evaluate me based on it” as she works. A workplace that can achieve this must be structured in such a way that:

• It’s easy to see how much effort a person is putting into the job.

• Everyone can see the results of the work.

• Everyone can see the results of changes and how they affect the output.

Actually, the shop floor lines in the Toyota Production System are very much in line with this kind of structure. Visual management, abnormality control, replenishment systems, production according to takt time, fixed quantity deliveries, just in time, one-piece flow, tsurube pull, and water spiders (water striders) have all been developed to make things easy to understand. These innovations help to:

• Show problems.

• Allow you to find issues fast.

• Reduce inventory.

• Reduce lead time.

• Grow and develop people.

I will deal with each method separately, but when good management is combined with all these methods, the switch is pushed on and the payback in results is multiplied. Making a work area that keeps on motivating people is a huge part of a manager’s job.

Downstream Pull/Replenishment Line

As has been stated many times, the most important thing in the Toyota Production System is the concept of flow. But flow by itself is not enough. One must properly incorporate a downstream pull and replenishment structure to reduce overproduction and get to an effective just-in-time method (see Figure 3-1).

Figure 3-1 You can see how much effort the team members are putting into improvement by viewing the finished goods store.

The supervisor is like a store or supermarket manager who has been given a retail business to manage. The store manager is responsible for the profit and loss for her supermarket. When you visit a supermarket, you can see the effectiveness and motivation of management just by looking at how much finished goods storage the supermarket has. If there are any problems with processes, things, people, or equipment, that manager will have to keep lots of inventory. If there isn’t much inventory, then you can assume that the manager’s kaizen efforts are working out well.

So the true picture of both how well one is managing and the skill level of the team in that area is visible at the finished goods store, and therefore people will naturally want to compete with the others so that they don’t look bad. Even if the skill level and assets are the same, good or bad management can have a big effect on the results. That is what the store can show you. Whenever I need to visit a company, I always start by looking at the finished goods storage. That pretty much tells me most of what I need to know about the place, including how driven to excel the management team is.

Also, since we are working in a downstream pull environment, the problems and issues of the downstream processes are also visible. The extent to which these issues can be corrected is largely determined by the leadership, technique, and collaboration and adjustment skills with other departments.

Basically, for the person in charge of an area, if he has an unmanaged finished goods store, it becomes blatantly obvious to everyone that he is a bad manager, he has no skill, and he also has no motivation to improve. Once you understand that, you can’t let things go on the way they are. You can’t reduce inventory right away, but as the department improves, the inventory can be lowered. What’s also critical is that when people see a reduction in the line’s store inventory, the supervisor in charge of the line is praised for it and it positively affects his evaluation, as a correct judgment should.

A good image is the supervisor using the production control board, teaching, growing, encouraging, and making a workplace good at both offense and defense. The line now says, “We are managing ourselves, even at such low store levels.” Basically, the inventory asset that was kept in the store has now changed to the skill level asset of the people in the line. Confidence gained this way will surely help with the next round of kaizen.

So our inventory asset has now changed into an asset of people’s skill. The supervisor, engineer, and workers were given a spark of motivation, and that, combined with the supervisor’s skill at developing people and her technical and managerial skills, was used to change the inventory asset into something that is not as easily measurable but much more useful.

My sincere wish is that you take these new assets so that you are always one step ahead and have a winning team.

The details of how we reduced the store inventory can be understood by going to the production control board. You should go to the board at least once an hour and talk to the workers. Ask them how the last hour went, have them reflect on the last hour, and then encourage them for the next hour. This kind of simple conversation will establish trust and lead to lots of good improvement ideas. Conversations that lead to improvement ideas won’t come out of an automatic digital control board that counts the production for you. There is no need to talk for a long time, and you don’t need to ask the workers how they were able to do it. Just using the hourly talk to thank them for their work and encourage them for the next hour is enough. This will also serve as a good example to the other “storekeepers” around you. Talk to the workers based on the production control board and everyone will benefit.

Sometimes people say, “It’s a waste of time for workers to have to write down numbers on the production control board.” These people believe that it is better to get one extra unit of production than to write things down on the board, and they automate the production control boards. However, if you approach the production control board and your team members with warmth and a personal touch, it will pay you a lot more dividends than free labor for one part day.

It is not a waste for employees to fill in the production control boards (see Figures 3-2 and 3-3). That is the start of conversations that beget improvement ideas.

Figure 3-2 The time it takes for employees to write things down is not wasted. It is the start of a good conversation that leads to improvement.

Figure 3-3 Talking with the operator in front of the production control board inspires a “can do” mindset and is the start of finding improvement opportunities.

Management and the supervisor having a conversation in front of the store for the line and the supervisor and the workers having a conversation in front of the production control board are what breathes life into the downstream pull production system. Challenge yourselves to do this so that you have a living management and create a fulfilling, exciting, and action-oriented workplace for everyone.

Dedicated Replenishment Lines

A dedicated replenishment line is a downstream pull line that makes things based on the pull from the downstream processes. “Dedicated” means that it makes only one product or part. The definition of a multiproduct line would be one that makes two or more types of things that require changeovers.

There are a lot of pros and cons that people look at in deciding whether to make something on a dedicated line or a multiproduct line, but generally speaking, if it is the same car, but with a different number of gears or a different shaft diameter, we would make it on the same line. This is still a dedicated line because even though the parts that go in are different, they are all made to takt time. If they cannot be made to takt time in the line, then they would be made on a subline.

At Toyota, we say, “Make things to takt time.” Takt time is found by taking the required production for the day and determining how much time you will take to make one part. Takt time is one of the three elements of standard work. (The others are work sequence and standard work in process.) It’s used not only to make the monthly plan for required labor, but also to make level production (heijunka), which creates the overall harmony of the plant. It is one of the most important aspects of the Toyota Production System.

If what we are making is basically the same automobile, the takt time is the same for all of them, so we can collect the lines that make the parts for the car and make them all at the same takt (pace) as the main assembly line. In other words, we can have production lines based on different products.

The good points of dedicated lines are that they are simple, and that it is easy to understand what is going on.

• Simple equipment with minimal investment to just do what is required

• Fewer equipment breakdowns because the lines are simple and don’t have unnecessary features

• Compact equipment that uses space wisely and efficiently

• Fewer changeovers mean stable quality

• Kaizen activities can easily add automation, and productivity can increase

• The employees’ kaizen skills will increase

• Shorter lead times

The key point of a successful dedicated line is to make the equipment simple, slim, compact, and low-cost.

In order to do this, it is imperative that we learn how to make our own equipment. The reason why I am a strong believer in making one’s own equipment is the following: it is obvious that a company should control its own core technology, but if you can add to that by making equipment that doesn’t exist anywhere else, you can really make use of your core skills and engineering. The other good thing about making equipment yourself is that every time you make something, new ideas are incorporated into the equipment. The engineers’ motivation increases, and as a result you are now well on your way toward “simple, slim, compact, and low-cost” equipment. Let’s compare this to production lines that can accommodate multiple products, which we will call all-purpose lines.

Presses and casting, forging, and molding activities pretty much operate in an all-purpose line environment. No businessman will put these machines, which cost lots of money, in a dedicated line.

To achieve the goal of making things to takt time, the dedicated line is obviously the better of the two. But because of constraints on technology, engineering skills, and equipment, there are still many all-purpose lines remaining. Most of the people working in this environment probably think that this situation is the way things will always be.

In the machinery production engineering department at Toyota, the rule was that you had to do a changeover for each kanban on the all-purpose lines. The evaluation of the all-purpose line and investment decisions were made not based on a comparison with the dedicated line, but rather on machine utilization and engineering constraints. The best way to look at an all-purpose line is to view it as a “management problem to be solved.”

There are many processes that have to be done with large-scale equipment because of engineering limitations, but I strongly believe that down the road, with innovation in processing, simple lines will be possible. The world is full of examples of small equipment that used to be a lot larger.

Further Development and Innovation on Dedicated Lines

Many companies that use small, dedicated equipment to get better results have a history of making their own machines. An in-house machine-making department is encouraging to production engineers as they work hard to master new processes. The managers support them, helping them make useful equipment and taking the time to hear updates from them on how things are going. By the way, during these updates, it’s best not to ask too many detailed questions, but rather to just say, “We are really looking forward to what you guys come up with, and we believe in you. Good job.” If the group members hear questions like, “Did you analyze this?” or, “What if you did it this way?” they may feel that they have to do this because a top manager told them to, and this will needlessly delay the timetable for the new piece of equipment.

To all you senior managers out there, “Your young people are a lot smarter than you are. Give them the authority to figure things out!” If you can do that, when they do succeed in making their machine, they will gain a huge amount of satisfaction and the company will get a lot of great assets in the process. (I’m talking less about machines and more about “can-do” people.)

Companies that figure out new processing methods and equipment can often take the cost of doing something down tenfold. Huge cost reductions become possible when you change the equipment that does the work.

Many companies make the same kinds of parts, all of which may have different takt times, in a multipart production line and make them at a very fast pace. Every time the company needs to make a new product, it will adjust the line a little bit, and where extra capacity is needed, it will add a new piece of equipment. This is how production lines get complex. The thinking is, “I’m using existing equipment, so the more new parts I can throw on this line, the lower the cost will be.” The accounting-based illusion of cost reduction makes it very hard to get away from this way of thinking.

However, as time passes, equipment becomes older, the mechanisms for joining the processes get worn down, and one day you will have to take out the old equipment and put a new piece of expensive machinery in its place. I have firsthand experience with this, and it really is not motivating at all to work hard to introduce new parts or products into such a line.

We really want to give our engineers the joy of using new equipment and new methods to produce the new products, and we want to incorporate the new ideas that we have had into our new line. That is motivating.

On the flip side, engineers are prone to be “catalog engineers,” just lining up expensive pieces of machinery that they can find in the marketplace. Because of this, top management must keep reminding them of simple, slim, compact, low cost, and short lead times. Encourage them to pursue these goals in their new lines, and let them feel that each time they make a new line; they are increasing their skills as well as increasing the company’s manufacturing bench strength.

You know you are well on the way to success when you hear words like, “Hey, what are you going to do next?” or, “What are you guys making now?” throughout the company. That atmosphere is fun and motivating for everyone!

Clear Straight Flow

It used to be that at banks, train ticket windows, and hotels, when there were three windows at which to purchase, there would be three lines leading up to them, but now the general idea is to have one line and have people go to the next space that opens up.

When we still had to line up at a particular window, you would see the other lines moving faster, and you would be upset at your bad luck and the slowness of the line you were in. (In some countries’ airports, we still have this situation, especially in the customs and immigration areas.)

While the single line does seem to have solved many problems, it has only spread the delay in the line more evenly for everyone; it has not really increased the speed at which the line is working or processing requests. Because of this, we cannot honestly say that this has solved the key issue. In fact, we are now less able to determine whether the delay is caused by the person’s work at the window or whether it has more to do with the customer.

If the line gets really long, help may arrive, but basically it is in an unmanaged state. The customers at least don’t have to deal with the feeling of, “I wonder if the next line would be faster,” but that’s about the only good thing. From the customers’ point of view, there still is a lot of waiting time associated with the line. From the employees’ point of view, no matter how hard they work, they really can’t make a big difference in the number of people waiting, and so it’s difficult to fairly evaluate their hard work.

This methodology (one line for multiple windows) is something that I do not recommend in a production facility; however, I see many companies managing queues this way. If this is allowed to continue, the production line and also the relationships of the people who work there will start to experience many problems.

Why is this not a good idea? Let me give you an actual example (see Figure 3-4).

Figure 3-4 Separating the store for each line makes the effort put in by the team members visible. This increases the drive to excel.

There were three production lines, each manned by two people, that could make the same parts. It was necessary to do a changeover when different parts had to be made. Once the team had made one product, it would then take the next production kanban for the group and make that. If production on one line was delayed, then the people and lines that depended on this line for product would face a shortage, and the overall production of the facility would be negatively affected.

The production kanbans that feed the three lines are really the same as the people lining up in a bank with many tellers. If one line has a delay, then the work orders are concentrated in the other two lines. The harder the other two lines work, the more jobs they have to do. Even though they are working hard, they still have only two-thirds of the total production capacity, so they will have to work overtime. Even if one of the lines isn’t stopped for the whole day, minor stoppages and defects will delay the group for a specific amount of time.

There are other problems, too. When the teams see the jobs lined up on the kanban board, they see some jobs that are easy to do and other jobs that are harder to do. This makes them think, “I don’t want to do two hard jobs in a row,” which then leads to subtle timing games to avoid the hard jobs. As a result, this group was always doing two hours of overtime a day.

In the Toyota method, we changed this to decide which products each line would make and separated the finished goods area for each line. Just by doing that, in a minimal amount of time, improvements started to happen, and the teams had less overtime. We even started seeing entries in the daily log like, “We finished our production early today, so we helped out the other line by taking two of its kanbans.” The teams also started to discuss the problematic products with one another and made changes to make the changeovers easier.

All that changed was the following, but they made all the difference.

1. It was easy to see the effects of “working hard.”

2. It was easy to see the production volume of each line.

3. The company listened to the teams’ improvement ideas.

We did not try to force a competition, but everyone wants to show that she is doing a better job than those on the other teams. When we created an environment in which this feeling could flourish, the teams started thinking about improvements, and this led to better teamwork between the teams as well. I really felt how wonderful it is to have good teamwork when I experienced this.

The results that these lines achieved started bringing in many “tourists” to the area, who then influenced the people and the production areas around them. A little drop in the pond had made big waves throughout the organization.

This methodology is called the clear flow method, where each line has predetermined products that it makes, and therefore, its capacity, flow, and also improvements become obvious to everyone. I also have previously mentioned this, but don’t forget to use the production management board.

Create a good structure and add good management to it to make a workplace that can make full use of people’s skill, improvement ideas, and teamwork. I think you can see that this is quite possible and not that difficult to do.

High-Frequency Pull

The kanbans coming in from the customer are like production instructions for our own operations. So how should one take the information from the customer and give it to the shop floor in a way that will encourage kaizen?

First of all, one could take all the orders that need to go into one truckload, separate them by product numbers, and give them to the lines in a “one-truckload chunk” of orders. When Toyota started working on the kanban system with its suppliers, this is how most of those suppliers did it, and many of them continue to use this method to this day. We call this ship set production. We make all the parts that will go on the truck, and all of those parts will be sent to the shipping area, where they are staged as one truckload and then loaded on the truck. So we are pulling per truckload, or a truckload pull. The good point is that we can combine certain jobs so that we can work in a batch or a pattern that minimizes changeovers.

The finished goods storage area for each line will have lots of finished goods sitting around before the pull for the truck, and hardly any inventory after the pull. If we choose this method, it will be very hard to see how well the management is doing its job by looking at the finished goods store. This is now a line where if you work hard at improving, it is hard to see the fruits of your labor, and it will also be hard for management to give a fair evaluation of the employees working there.

The other method will be to pull one kanban’s worth of parts from the finished goods area and then to start production on one kanban’s worth of parts. In the Toyota group, we have improved our logistics functions so that we can do this. We call this the high-frequency pull method. It will not be efficient to pull one kanban’s worth of goods from one line, so one logistics person will look after several lines. He will make a round every 10 or 15 minutes, going around the area and pulling finished goods from the different lines (parts) at each bus stop.

When the logistics person takes away the finished goods, he will take the kanban attached to the goods that he just picked and give it back to the production line. This then becomes the production kanban. The production line will then produce in the sequence in which it gets the kanbans. In this case, we will get a group of kanbans from the customer, but we will put the kanbans in a sequence for the production lines and go pick each one that was finished.

In order to be able to do this kind of production, it is essential that the changeovers from one type of production to another can be done very fast and easily and within the kanban replenishment time.

Since we’ve already got to this point, let’s put in an hourly production control board where the manager of the line and the people who work there can talk about what went well and what needs improvement. It’s equally important to talk about the successes, such as why are we able to work with much less inventory now and what was the key activity that we did to accomplish this. The manager then needs to thank the team and make sure that the activity is counted toward them. If people don’t feel that their hard work is appreciated, there is no real reward for those transporting the parts in the high-frequency method.

There are many benefits to doing a high-frequency pull, but the main ones are:

• We can know the status of the production line in real time.

• We can see how good a job the manager of the line is doing.

By accomplishing these things, people are more motivated and kaizen change for good starts happening on its own.

Teaching people what high-frequency pull is and saying, “Do high-frequency pull” is not enough for success. Without having a mechanism allowing the hard work that people do to be evaluated visually and appreciated, the only benefit you will get will be less work in process. Please don’t forget that the real benefit of high-frequency pull is to coax out the motivation of the manager and the workers on that line.

If your company is still doing a truckload pull, it means that you are ignoring the hard work of your people and your managerial staff. If we can easily see the hard work that people put in and can compare the different lines, everyone naturally wants to say, “How can we do it better?” If you can keep this at the forefront of your deployment, I highly recommend high-frequency pull as a tool to motivate your people to make more improvements and at a faster pace.