The Land of Pharma: The Toyota Production System

A lot has been made of Toyota being a benchmark of Quality lately. This is due, of course, to the incredible lack of quality that has popped up in their vehicles designed and produced during their march to the top of the world automotive industry. There has been little detail around the reasons for this failure save the normal weak explanations like “they grew too fast” and “they got greedy.” What a horrible shame this is and what a freakishly perfect example of the ineptitude of major media, as well. Please, dear reader, allow me to do my best to fill in the back story. I will keep it concise.

In 1945, the US blew up Japan and then took it over (concise enough?). We had a reconstruction policy that was, in a word, perfect. We did everything we could to instill what we believed to be right (after all, if Western Society didn’t believe it to be right, we wouldn’t be doing it) and set up Japan to be even better at it than we were. Years go by and in the latter part of the century, while the US was producing the Chevy Luv and other such nonsense, Japan had put their shoulder to the wheel. Toyota, the largest car company there, knew that the only way they could ever compete was to make superior product. Still on the outs from having had nuclear weapons dropped on them, they couldn’t ever invest capital in the same way GM or Ford could. Enter, the Toyota Production System (TPS).

The TPS espoused that if one never wasted anything (no rejected parts, no downtime for workers or machines, no scrap that could be used elsewhere) then they would have a “lean” system that produced only Quality products. This is to say, if you never have to reject anything, you never made anything that had to be rejected in the first place. Brilliant, huh?

So as everyone else in manufacturing realized that Toyota cars lasted forever, that their margins were fat, and that their manufacturing never went down, everyone began to adopt the same principles.

Let me say that you are probably saying to yourself “this TPS thing is just common sense like ‘waste not, want not’ and a dozen other old-timey sayings” and you are right. Don’t let that fact distract you.

Anyway, to get to the point, the culprit here in the takedown of Toyota is greed. And not necessarily bad greed where they just want cash, but the kind of greed that is tunnel-vision and just turns the eye away from the foundational principles that made something great in the first place. For the people that developed the TPS, the overall goal was always Quality. Being “lean” didn’t equal profits directly. Lean equaled quality products, which equaled a good reputation, which equaled sustainability, which equaled profits. But all of those equal signs got confusing, and something was identified as “waste” which was actually one of those intangibles that must exist in human culture: measure twice and cut once because well-meaning people get it wrong sometime. Here, it was the process engineers that thought “That should get it” and they didn’t measure again. And that culture of peer review seems to have been lost overall, as a lot of little issues keep popping up for Toyota now.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe in “waste not, want not” and the principles of the TPS get you there in a lot of ways. But like any tool, it is only as good as the folks using it. So up here in the Land of Pharma, we measure a dozen times and then talk about cutting, because medicine isn’t a car.