Toyota Recalls Vehicles Again
Toyota, the father of lean manufacturing is facing some serious quality issues recently. In the latest of these, they are recalling around 270,000 vehicles globally. This is another setback for the giant vehicle manufacturer. Recall is due to faulty engine valves according to media and has affected the luxury Toyota brands Lexus and Crown.
From a lean manufacturing point of view, these quality problems are very serious concerns. Lean methodology is about driving out waste and offer the customer want they want at a lower price wit highest quality.
When it comes to Toyota, they have huge number of outsourced manufacturers and vendors from whom Toyota get their parts and assemble. Even a failure of a single vendor and failure of Toyota to find the problem before the stuff hit the market, can really drive you to results like these.
In lean mindset quality inspection can be considered as a non value added activity. But with the problems Toyota facing today, it will be a very valuable to go for an intense quality inspection together with the high end quality assurance methods Toyota being following.
2 comments:
AZA,
Until Toyota takes of their blinders and looks across the board in their Quality Assessment and Lean studies, they will continue to have their problems. All they have to do is look at GM and their past.
The first thing you learn in Quality (especially Lean) is cross functional analysis. Espically when doing Root Cause Analysis.
Have a great day,
Jack
I'm sure Toyota will figure this out. I'd still buy a Toyota over a GM vehicle any day. But this is definietly a good lesson learned for all Lean manufacturers. However, I think if Toyota would have handled the PR side of things better, this whole thing wouldn't be as big of a mess.
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