It’s back to basics for Toyota. Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.
“When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything. We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Mitsuru Kawai, the company’s veteran assigned by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants.
“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again. To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.” Kawai adds.
The reason behind this is to allow Toyota’s workers to get to the basics on building cars, apart from developing new skills and perhaps improving the production line and car-building process. It might sound like Toyota is moving backwards, but the company claims that by allowing manual labour in crankshaft manufacturing has lead to the reduction in scrap material and a shortening of the production line by 96% in three years.
Nonetheless, this “back to basics” method may be the next best thing for the automaker since Toyota’s ingenious Toyota Production System about decades ago!
[Source: Bloomberg]
