No Satisfaction at Toyota

Enlarge

Enlarge

In the Works Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, assembly plant is its largest outside of Japan. It makes a half-million cars a year--one every 27 seconds.

Finish Line: A worker does final inspection. Toyota's assembly lines make thousands of changes a year to how the work is done.

The Story Of The Totes

The Toyota factory in Georgetown sits on a piece of green ground as flat as a table. The factory itself is low, yet so large it stretches to the horizon, no matter what side you approach it from. There's space inside to play 100 football games, with room for fans on the sidelines. A network of heavily trafficked streets runs through the place, with travel lanes in each direction.

Cars are the most complicated objects most people use routinely; to watch cars get made is to pull back the curtain on raw human ingenuity. At Georgetown, that ingenuity often appears in unexpected, and unexpectedly simple, ways.

Howard Artrip, 45, is standing at the assembly line alongside a rack of blue plastic totes filled with sun visors and seat belts. Just beyond Artrip and the rack of totes, a line of Camrys and Avalons pass by, freshly painted but hollow--no engines, no dashboards, no seats.

Artrip, a manager in the assembly area, is telling the story of how the totes--ordinary Rubbermaid carryalls--solved a decision-making problem. "There used to be eight racks of parts here," he says. The racks crowded the workstation, giving the worker ready access to all possible parts. The operator would eyeball the car coming up the line, step to the racks of visors and seat belts, and, says Artrip, "grab the right parts and run to the car." He or she would step into the slowly advancing car, bolt belts and visors in place, step back onto the factory floor--and do it again. All in 55 seconds, the unvarying time each slowly moving car spends at each workstation.

The problem was, there were 12 possible combinations of sun visors and nine variations of seat belts. So just deciding which parts to snatch had become a job in itself. In every shift, 500 cars passed the racks, each car needing four specific parts: 2,000 opportunities to make an error. Even with 99% perfection, five cars per shift got the wrong sun visors or seat belts. The job--installing parts--had become cluttered with meaningless decision making.

So a team of assembly employees made a real decision. Don't make the worker pick the parts; let him focus on installing them. The idea seems obvious in retrospect: Deliver a kit of presorted visors and seat belts--one kit per car, each containing exactly the right parts. The team applied the simplest technology available, the blue Rubbermaid caddy. "We went just down the road to Wal-Mart and bought them," Artrip says. Now, the line worker doesn't have to make any decisions at all. Just grab the handle of the blue tote like a lunch pail and step into the car.

Media accounts often report that a typical Toyota assembly line in the United States makes thousands of operational changes in the course of a single year. That number is not just large, it's arresting, it's mind-boggling. How much have you changed your work routine in the past decade? Toyota's line employees change the way they work dozens of times a year.

In the case of the blue tote, the change came out of a routine analysis of dozens of assembly-line jobs at Georgetown. When the simplification effort started three years ago, Artrip's team found 44 jobs where assemblers had to make 1 or 2 decisions as they installed parts. They found 23 workstations that required between 7 and 11 decisions.

Any jobs requiring 7 to 11 decisions in 55 seconds were going to cause problems. So dozens of jobs incurred small changes--grab the blue tote instead of choosing individual parts. Now, 85 line jobs require just 1 or 2 decisions. Not a single job requires 7 or more decisions. The work is easier, the results are better.

This is exactly the kind of work Artrip has spent more than half his career at Toyota doing: looking for ways to make the assembly line faster, simpler, safer--ways to make it easier to do the work perfectly. Continuous improvement is not some add-on to the real work, it isn't some special project Artrip has to do on top of his routine responsibilities, nor is he a guy who parachutes into the assembly line from an engineering building somewhere else. It is what he comes to the factory every day thinking about. It isn't exhausting, it's exhilarating.

Artrip has been at Georgetown for 19 years. The way he does his work is so compelling it has become part of his personal life. "When I'm mowing the grass, I'm thinking about the best way to do it. I'm trying different turns to see if I can do it faster," he says. He has analyzed his morning routine. "I do the same standardized work in the shower every morning. I have to get here at 6 a.m., and I know it takes 19 minutes, including walking into the plant." He smiles. "I've maximized my sleep time."