Toyota discloses unprecedented details of F1 development

Genchi means ”at the site” and Genbutsu means “the real item”. A Toyota philosophy that encourages you to go to the problem and see for yourself, not to rely on second-hand information. In this spirit, when asked whether a certain job is done, it is expected to check the result with your own eyes rather than dismissively say “it should be done by now”.

PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Action)

Richard Cregan: “PDCA is a constant improvement loop process whereby you don’t just plan and do something, you plan it, you do it, you check it and then you act on all of those all issues and go back into the planning loop. It’s a constant process that is itself constantly evolving. Quite often outside the TPS you have plan and do, but you don’t have the other two follow-ons. The check and action aspects are very often forgotten, but we tend to focus on them. For example, we apply PDCA on the car build. In the beginning we were working on seven days, we reduced it to five days, and now turnaround on a car is between two and three days, and that’s including painting, checking on the chassis, everything like that. We use PDCA in the sense that we plan the build, do the build, and check where we have lost time, gained time. And that becomes part of the action for the next plan. That’s how we apply it.”

Toyota Production System (TPS) Toyota Production System (TPS) is essentially a manufacturing system developed by Toyota which increases efficiency throughout the organisation by eliminating muda, or waste through kaizen. TPS carefully balances the valuable commodities of time and quality, never reducing the former at the expense of latter, whilst all the time trying to minimise cost. Now TPS is being extended throughout all the company’s functions and not just to the production areas.

Kaizen

John Howett: “There are two elements to kaizen. One is of course continuous improvement as it is generally understood. But at the same time kaizen is also asking you to scrap useless processes, because they’re not fundamental to the primary target. So kaizen is a way of constantly looking for improvement, but it’s not just boring incremental improvements. When kaizen really starts to work we almost ask, why do we make part X? Because actually that part hasn’t changed in the last three years, and we could get it made by a supplier, and focus that machine on something else. Our composite department is a good example. They’ve gone beyond their own group now, and are talking to the designers about how to actually change the design to make it easier to build, and therefore they’re fundamentally influencing maybe not the shape, but the structure of the elements.”

Jidouka / Just In Time

Two pillar concepts of TPS. Jidouka can be translated as “automation”, but Toyota’s definition is for a machine to prevent occurrence of defects in case of quality or equipment problems by sensing this automatically and shutting itself down. In this sense, Jidouka at Toyota means “intelligent automation”. Just In Time refers to the manufacture of only what is needed when it is needed in the quantity it is needed at that specific time. Just in Time (JIT) can only be achieved through the existence of Heijunka (levelling production).

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