PROBLEM SOLVING: THE TOYOTA WAY

The following article comes directly from the online course, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, by Dr.Jeffrey K. Liker with George Trachilis. These materials are also part of the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels.

Message from George Trachilis

In June 2012, Dr. Liker came to my home town of Winnipeg, Canada to speak at our Lean conference. I had planned to pick him up at the airport, take him on a boat ride on the Red River, then take him to the conference where he would do a keynote speech for just over one hour, and then drive him back to the airport, all in the same day. I had a few great conversations with him, but two of them stood out for me. The first was when we were on the river and started discussing the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (unfinished at the time) which was well over budget, coming in at a total cost of $351 million, and two years late in its construction. 

Jeff Liker and George Trachilis meet in Winnipeg, Canada in 2012

We talked about how Lean applies to all industries, including construction. The second came after his speech. Many managers were waiting in line for Dr. Liker to sign his latest book The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, when one of the managers asked, “Dr. Liker what is it that prevents Lean thinking from being sustained in many companies?” Jeff looked the manager in the eyes, and said, “In one word, Leadership.”

The conversation that then ensued had me thinking about this missing link. I do not know about you, but when I receive clarity in my life, I capture it by setting a new goal around that new focal point. In this way, I start moving towards it, hopefully in the right direction. This was the right direction, and I knew it.

One of the most memorable topics in Jeff’s keynote is contained in this book. Jeff’s perspective about Lean, being much more than waste reduction, comes from Sakichi Toyoda’s approach to developing the best loom in the world. He was not eliminating waste; he was solving one problem at a time, on the way to achieving his vision of an automated loom.

Enjoy this great story, it has changed my perspective of Lean and Leadership. This story changed the way I approach Lean and problem-solving. I held a new definition for Lean from that day forward. Lean, for me, was re-defined as problem solving towards a vision, the Sakichi Toyoda way.

George Trachilis, Professional Engineer

President, Lean Leadership Institute Inc.

The teaching objectives for this section are the following:

1.     Describe how Toyota started as a company.

2.     List the values that are still with the company today.

3.     Identify the main contributors to Toyota’s success.

Now let’s hear about the teaching objectives of this book, and then we will join Dr. Liker Live!

If you should need to refer to a glossary for terms that may not be familiar to you, please refer to https://leanleadership.guru/glossary/. 

Where did this start?this somewhat unique way of thinking about a company, about a business, about how to improve processes, about the role of leaders? It started with Sakichi Toyoda who was the founder of the Toyota Automatic Loom and most of you know the story of the wood looms that he created.

The motivation at the time: He was the son of a carpenter, a poor carpenter in an out-of-the-way rice farming village in Japan, not near a city center or any center of power. He simply made the observation that women, including his mother and grandmother, were working their fingers to the bone making cloth for the family and for sale after a full day of work.

His mission was to help them by reducing the amount of labor required to make this cloth and so he invented the loom. He could invent the loom partly because he understood wood, he was a carpenter, he had deep craft knowledge, and he was imaginative and could think of a clever solution and with his own hands, he could put the solution into practice. 

Jeffrey K. Liker delivers this keynote speech in Winnipeg, Canada (2012).

The first loom he created and the first invention was simple and used gravity. He watched these women. They would have a shuttle of thread, which they would send with their hands back and forth, and then they would have to push the thread and tighten it and that was the action; back and forward, push the thread and tighten the cloth. He thought perhaps that action of pushing back and forth could be done by gravity.

He created a wood shoot and a system with foot pedals with which you could make the shuttle slide down, and the shoot would go back and forth and eliminate at least half the labor. As it turned out the women were three times as productive. 

This is a good Kaizen but again it came from a need, a real need; it came from somebody who had invested deeply in skills, in craft-based knowledge and could actually do something with their hands and could imagine it; he could imagine how you could make it because of his deep knowledge of woodworking.

Then he improved upon it and then he improved upon it again and again and eventually he had a vision of making a fully functional automatic loom that I think about 20 years later became the G type loom. At the time, it was the only fully automatic loom in the world and it was the best loom. He later sold that to the Platt Brothers in England and that money became the capital to start the Toyota Motor Company. That is how the story goes. 

 THE G-TYPE LOOM

Demonstration of the G-type loom at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana (TMMI)

The G loom, of course, was light years ahead of its time. The technology was so advanced for the 1920s and 1930s that it was just incredible. I'd like to show you some of the parts. First of all, there is the shuttle, which is the change that made this loom revolutionary. A shuttle passes across, and that is called one pick. At each pick, a spring-loaded pin constantly checks the diameter of the bobbin.

The bobbin inside the shuttle carries about seven minutes’ worth of yarn. Before this loom was invented, an operator could manage only about three to four looms, and after this it was thirty to forty; this was a great improvement in efficiency. This is the reach system that moves forward on each cycle and tightens the weave and just behind it is the heale that consists of two curtains operating independently.

The work yarn passes through a loop, and then you have two rows of wires from each tail curtain and that creates a shed for the shuttle to run through, one direction every other strand of the yarn is up as the shuttle moves. When it returns they reverse and then the strand moves down so you have the over/under weave effect; one up, one down, one up, one down. Alright if you're ready, we will start it up. See this video at https://leanleadership.guru/audiobook/. 

Norm Bafunno, President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana (TMMI)

My name is Norm Bafunno; I'm the president of TMMI. We are certainly very honored and very excited to have this important part of Toyota history right here in southwestern Indiana. Many people would not expect to see a loom here; they expect to see an automobile, but our founding father established principles in the spirit of challenge, in the spirit of innovation.

This attitude enabled bringing a machine like this into the marketplace and eventually selling the patent rights that formed the company that we know today as Toyota. We have an opportunity to use this type of equipment to teach our team members these fundamental aspects of our business. You saw Larry demonstrating with one piece of yarn that would fail.

If there were no detection of a failed piece of yarn, the entire canvas would be ruined until somebody noticed there would be a string of defective yarn missing. We wanted to . . . Sakichi Toyoda wanted to find a way to automatically detect the problem. We use that same type of detection in building every one of our vehicles. If there's a problem our line stops, we address it, resolve it and move forward. So these basic and fundamental aspects of our business are very transferable. 

Jeff Liker: Everything he invented was the solution to a specific problem and it was all done by trial and error. So he goes from nothing to having the best loom in the world--fully automated--and how did he do that? It wasn't a dream wherein he imagined the G type loom. It was through solving hundreds of problems and working with a team of people to do it. 

 He didn't know how he was going to get beyond that one problem to have this perfect loom, but he knew there'd be a next problem and a next problem, and overtime if he kept solving problems, he would get closer and closer to his vision. 

The core values coming from Sakichi Toyoda are still with the company today, and the values contribute to society?that's the purpose of the company. The customer always comes first and the company always comes second. Respect for people. Know your business; you can't be hands-off. Get your hands dirty, work hard, have discipline, practice teamwork and constantly innovate toward a vision. 

In a seminal speech by son Kiichiro, who had been asked by his father to do something special for society, to contribute something, Sakichi Toyoda says he contributed the automatic loom, and now it's your turn. Kiichiro Toyoda picks automobiles, a very unlikely choice given that they're out in the middle of nowhere in Japan and there are huge companies like Ford, and they can't possibly compete.

In a seminal speech he says, “I plan to cut down on the slack time in work processes. As the basic principle, I will uphold the just-in-time approach.”

Now, if he said that today, he'd have an army of consultants behind him and he'd have my books and he'd have the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) and Lean Leadership Institute (LLI) books and everyone would know exactly what he's talking about by just in time. 

But around 1939 Lean hadn't been invented as a term, and the concept of just in time had not been invented. He made it up; it was a vision. What we do know is that he conceptualized a vision like Sakichi Toyoda’s vision of the automatic loom and had no idea exactly what it was or how he was going to get there. 

The person who made it happen, who made this this vision a reality, was Taiichi Ohno, a manufacturing genius, and he and his team accepted Kiichiro Toyoda's challenge to achieve the just-in-time concept. There was a goal, a challenge, to catch up to Ford's productivity in three years. Ford was about nine times as productive and making over a million vehicles a year and Toyota was making a few thousand automobiles, and they made a variety, not just one Model T, which I guess was the Model A at the time.

He achieved the Toyota Production System, although he didn’t know what it would be called or how he would achieve it. He's just tried to achieve a manufacturing system under the conditions that they faced in Japan at that time, without capital, without resources; they would somehow learn to compete with this global giant; that was the challenge. The way he did it was through adaptive problem-solving like Sakichi Toyoda did.

He solved one problem at a time and in his book The Toyota Production System, a timeline was incorporated and therefore it was possible to see where each aspect of the Toyota Production System got introduced. Along the way, when problems arose, he'd come up with a solution. 

 One-Minute Review

·        Sakichi Toyoda was the founder of an automatic loom company. His G-type loom was the best in the world in the 1920s.

·        Kiichiro was asked what he wanted to contribute to society. He picked automobiles.

·        How did Sakichi Toyoda create the best loom in the world?

·        He had a vision and he solved one problem at a time getting closer and closer to his vision.

·        Toyoda’s values, still with the company today, are:

o  Contribute to society

o  Place the customer first/company second

o  Respect people

o  Know your business

o  Get your hands dirty

o  Work hard

o  Practice discipline

o  Exercise teamwork, and

o  Constantly innovate toward a vision

·        The automatic loom automatically detects failure and the machine stops.

·        Today the same principle (Jidoka) is applied. Poke yoke, or mistake proofing, was also applied to the automatic loom.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING

George Trachilis: In a recent trip to Japan in 2016, I met Mr. Matt Amezawa, a 50-year Toyota veteran. He showed us a great video of the origins of Toyota as a company. Although he would not give me the original video, he did allow me to record while we were in class watching. Enjoy an in-depth view of the Toyota origins by going to this YouTube link, https://youtu.be/yZMHne1JxQM

________ The End, This was one of 75 sections of the online course. _______

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