By Kevin Meyer
While Toyota executives are scurrying around having lost their way, the employees at their factories are doing what Toyota does best: improving.
For the past week, Toyota's leaders have wrestled with the fallout from an unprecedented recall of 4.5 million vehicles that will likely cost the automaker $2 billion in repairs and lost sales. Here at the company's largest North American plant, the workers who assemble two of those recalled models are thinking more than ever about quality.
Those employees still understand that the power of the Toyota system revolves around people, especially the brains of those people.
Workers affected by the idling had the option of taking paid vacation or unpaid leave, but the vast majority came to work, with many taking training sessions, cleaning assembly line stations or applying new coats of paint. But it's also been a time for the plant's more than 200 "quality circles" to meet and find ways to solve assembly problems, searching for sometimes elusive answers to Toyota's quest for better efficiency and lower costs.
Each circle, a program done globally at Toyota plants, consists of seven to eight employees across the plant who volunteer to focus on a particular issue. When the assembly lines are running, the circles meet after work or during break times.
So what types of problems and issues are tackled?
"Sometimes it's tough to work on the processes while the line is up, so this is an opportune time this week to go to the process and make some modifications while the line is down," said Nancy Corey, quality circle administrator in Georgetown.
On Friday, among the teams meeting were one examining how to make faster and less expensive repairs to tools and another looking to recycle a supplier's velcro ties.
"Some things seem very small but they have a big impact," Corey said.
Small things... small improvements. Toyota is known for many suggestions per employee per year and the art and science of kaizen. The cumulative effect is massive in terms of productivity and quality.
Toyota is also known for the andon - celebrating the discovery of problems as a chance to improve, and the stopping of the line to ensure those discovered problems never see the light of day. Contain the problem, fix the problem, then prevent the problem from ever reoccurring. I saw it myself when I visited the Lexus factory in Kyushu.
Toyota's executives, perhaps in their haste to grow and conquer new markets, forgot that last part. They still have a chance to survive the increasing maelstrom if they leverage what their employees still remember.