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3Mar

Principle 7: Develop Towering Technical Competence in All Engineers

“We develop people and new products simultaneously using the Toyta way.”
Uchi Okamota, former Vice President, N.A. Body and Structures Engineering

To excel at the talent-driven business of product development, a company must have highly-skilled, capable, motivated people. Achieving a lean PD process with a precise and synchronized execution of a leveled flow means that everyone working on a PD program must do his or her job correctly and on time. To prevent disruption and ensure success a company must be willing to take major investments in the process of selecting and developing technical competence in all of its engineers. In a lean system, people learn best from a combination of direct experience and mentoring.

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2Mar

Principle 6: Organize to Balance Functional Expertise and Cross-Functional Integration

Principle 6: Organize to Balance Functional Expertise and Cross-Functional Integration

“One result of the Prius development project is something called obeya – big room – where the chief engineer gathers the team of people responsible for that project. That is where simultaneous engineering can be even more effectively implemented by all the key people coming together in this area.”
Takeshi Uchiyamada, first chief engineer of the Prius Hybrid

 

One Best Organizational Structure?

The functional organization groups like specialties and like-minded professionals into departments. The functional organization had several advantages but there was one big problem with this organizational approach – functional specialists tended to bond and become more wedded to their function and profession than to the company and its products and customers. Their measure of success was how well the functional department performed and how big a budget it garnered. They believed their profession could be the savior of the company; if they ran things, the company would be successful beyond belief. As a result, no function did a particularly good job of working in coordination with the other functions. Today, these isolated functions are often denoted by derogatory terms like functional silos or chimneys.

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1Mar

Principle 5: Create a Chief Engineer System to Lead Development from Start to Finish

Principle 5: Create a Chief Engineer System to Lead Development from Start to Finish

“We can be successful at Toyota only when we do something better than our competitors or when we surpass the average for the industry. If we are designing a new product, and know there is no room for failure, our attitude certainly must not be just to aim for the average. If we do that, we will surely fail. We must do our all-out best at such times, and allow ourselves no thought of failure.”
Kenya Nakamura, first chief engineer of Toyota Crown

The Cultural Icon Behind the CE System

The responsibilities of the Chief Engineer (CE) and his/her small staff:

  • voice of the customer
  • customer-defined value
  • product concept
  • program objectives
  • vehicle-level architecture
  • vehicle-level performance
  • vehicle-level characteristics
  • vehicle-level objectives
  • vision for all functional program teams
  • value targets
  • product planning
  • performance targets
  • project timing

The CE ultimate responsibility is delivering value to the customer. While Toyota always emphasizes teamwork, there is always one person who is accountable for the success of the team. For product development, this person is the CE.

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28Feb

Principle 4: Utilizing Rigorous Standardization to Reduce Variation and Create Flexibility and Predictable Outcomes

“Today’s standardization is the necessary foundation on which tomorrow’s improvement will be based. If you think of ‘standardization’ as the best you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow – you get somewhere. But if you think of standards as confining, then progress stops.”
Henry Ford

Standardized work is one of the core disciplines of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in which jobs are specified down to the second to match takt time – the rate of customer demand. Standardization, coupled with a culture of discipline are the most powerful weapons a product development organization can bring to bear against the destructive power of variation identified (queuing theory). Standard development processes build trust, enable development speed through precise synchronization and are key to successfully managing the very complex process of developing new vehicles.

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27Feb

Principle 3: Create a Leveled Product Development Process Flow

At Toyota we try to make every process like a tightly linked chain – where the processes are connected by information and by physical flow. There’s nowhere for a problem to hide. The chain never works perfectly. But if we know where our breaks are and our people are trained to fix the breaks, we get stronger every day in the company. It keeps us on our toes, it self-identifies muda and, five whys is our method to eliminate muda.
Glenn Uminger, Toyota Manufacturing Corporation, North America

The Power of Flow

Using cellular manufacturing, Toyota extended the concept of “one-piece flow,” or leveled flow, throughout its operations – even into supplier operations.

Toyota’s success starts with viewing the Product Development (PD) as a process. Like any process, PD has a cadence and repeated cycles of activity. Toyota has done an exceptional job of standardizing the PD process to bring to the surface the repeated cadence that allows continuous improvement through repeated cycles of waste reduction. Toyota has managed to “level the flow”, not only by eliminating waste (muda) but also by eliminating “unevenness” (mura) and “overburden” (muri).

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23Feb

Set-Based concurrent Engineering

Set-Based concurrent Engineering

Examining multiple alternatives during the styling activity is an example of set-based concurrent engineering. Toyota considers a broad range of alternatives and systematically narrows the sets to a final, often superior, choice.

Set-based concurrent engineering considers the different design perspectives proposed by different parties, a phenomenon that can best be graphically illustrated by Venn diagrams. Each party has some acceptable range of alternatives – a solution space that will work from its own perspective. Front-loading finds where the sets overlap and, in the process, identifies the winning design solution.

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22Feb

Principle 2: Front-Load the Product Development Process to Explore Alternatives Thoroughly

The ability to influence the success of a PD program is never greater than at the start of a project. The further into the process, the greater the constraints on decision making. Empirical evidence shows that poor decisions early in the process have a negative impact on cost and timing, which increases exponentially as time passes and the project matures. Although this is recognized, very few companies understand how to take advantage of this golden front-end opportunity by making wise front-end investments.

“The manager’s job is to prevent decisions from being made too quickly… but once a decision is made, we change it only if absolutely necessary.”
Toyota General Manager of Body Engineering

The Lean Product Development System (LPDS) model’s second principle, Front-Loading the Product Development Process to Explore Alternatives Thoroughly, is the foundation for flawless execution throughout the program and is analogous to the shopfloor maxim of measure twice – cut once.

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18Feb

Principle 1: Establish Customer-Defined Value to Separate Value-Added from Waste

The customer is always the starting point in a lean system, so defining waste starts with defining what a customer values.

“What is our business is not determined by the producer but the customer. It is not defined by the company’s name, statutes, or articles of incorporation but by the want the customer satisfies when he buys a product or service. The question can therefore only be answered by looking at the business from the outside, from the point of view of the customer.”
Peter F. Drucker

Waste in product development generally occurs in one of two broad areas: 1) engineering and 2) product development process.

  1. Waste by poor engineering that results in low levels of product or process performance. This is the most destructive waste.
  2. Waste in the product development process itself.

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20Jan

13 principles of the Toyota Product Development System (TPDS)

The Toyota Product Development System (TPDS) is a Sociotechnical System (STS) divided upon three major areas; Process, People and Tools&Technology as discussed earlier. Hence, this division of three major areas are based upon 13 principles1;

Process

1. Establish Customer-Defined Value to Separate Value-Added from Waste.
2. Front-Load the Product Development Process to Explore Thoroughly Alternative Solutions while there is Maximum Design Space
3. Create a Leveled Product Development Process Flow
4. Utilize Rigorous Standardization to Reduce Variation, and Create Flexibility and Predictable Outcomes.

People

5. Develop a Chief Engineer System to Integrate Development from Start to Finish.
6. Organize to Balance Functional Expertise and Cross-functional Integration.
7. Develop Towering Technical Competence in all Engineers.
8. Fully Integrated Suppliers into the Product Development System.
9. Build in Learning and Continuous Improvement.
10. Build a Culture to Support Excellence and Relentless Improvement.

Tools & Technology

11. Adapt Technology to Fit your People and Process.
12. Align your Organization through Simple, Visual Communication.
13. Use Powerful tools for Standardization and Organizational Learning.

1 Liker, J.K and Morgan, J.M, The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process and Technology, Productivity Press, 2006

20Sep

Toyota Product Development System

Toyota Product Development System

The Toyota Product Development System is a Sociotechnical System (STS) which is divided into three main categories; people, process and tools&technology. Furthermore, these three categories consists of 13 principles. I’ve tried to summarize these three categories with the 13 principles of the Toyota Product Development System into one single picture.