Toyota Motor Manufacturing Usa Case Study

45-765

Production and Operations Management

Toyota Motor Manufacturing, U.S.A. Inc.

February 21, 2002

Table of Contents

I. Executive Summary

II. Analysis

III. Recommendation & Implementation

IV. Risks & Contingencies

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Toyota Motors Manufacturing (TMM) faces increasing problems with its seat supply. TMM’s single seat supplier, Kentucky Framed Seat (KFS), is responsible for the majority of the problems with material flaws and missing parts as the major encountered defects. These problems are increasingly occurring with an increase in varieties of and demand for the seats. Toyota currently addresses these problems offline; however, this is a deviation from the policies and procedures under the Toyota Production System (TPS). Now, as TMM ramps up for the production of the Camry Wagon, it must address the seat issue before seriously impacting production performance.

We recommend the following major measures to overcome these problems:

Immediate

• Send TMM Quality Control (QC) people to KFS to identify and correct the source of the problem.

• Place a QC person at the seat arrival dock to check for defects before sending seats to the line.

• Continue fixing seat defects off line. It is too expensive to stop the line.

• Assign employees to be responsible that correct replacement seats are procured in a timely manner.

Long Term

• Improve internal communication within Toyota, specifically between the Japanese design engineers and US manufacturing.

• Decrease seat variety.

• Implement TPS processes at the KFS factory. Fujio Cho pronounced this to be the next step for TMM. KFS is a logical first supplier to implement Toyota’s methods of production.

II. ANALYSIS

Ideally, Toyota corrects defects on the production line. However, vehicles with seat problems are managed offline after the assembly is completed. This is caused by three factors;