How Toyota integrates Product Development

How Toyota integrates Product Development

1. Renaissance

   • Emphasis on
     • Built in quality
     • Waste elimination
     • Faster throughputs

2. Integration

   • Japanese success
   • U.S weakness
   • Product design
   • Manufacturing process desgin

3. Coordination Based on Writing

   • Coordinate efforts with other people in other functions
     • Talk face to face
       • Quickly make adjustments to find common ground
       • Other's point of view
       • Richest form of communication
         • For product development
   • Direct contact between the members of different functions
     • Important
   • Other companies
     • Colocate functional experts
       • To occur interaction
     • Have gone away with written forms
       • don't have the richness of information
         • or interactive qualities
     • Meetings
       • Costly time
       • Costly efficiency
       • Limited value added
       • Lose focus
   • Toyota
     • Not colocates engineers to dedicated project teams
     • Most people resides within functional areas
       • Work on projects
     • Emphasizes written communication
       • Cross functional coordination
       • Protocol
         • Write a report
           • Presents the diagnosis of the problem
           • Key information
           • Recommendations
         • Distribute the report to the concerned parties
         • Accompanied by a phone call or a short meeting
           • Highlight key points and emphasize info
         • Feedback of the receiver
           • there are outstanding disagreements, then it's time to hold a meeting to hammer out a decision face to face
             • solving the specific problem without wasting time
         • Write a final version of the report
           • presents all sides of the question.
       • participants already understand the key issues, are all working from a common set of data
         • prepared proposals and responses.
       • Benefits
         • documents and summarizes analysis and decision making
         • forces engineers in every function to gather opinions from other functions
         • The standard format also helps engineers make sure they have covered the important angle

4. Mentoring Supervisors

   • Supervisors and higher-level managers are deeply involved in the details of engineering design.
   • Young engineers
     • get approval from their functional supervisors
       • for each step involved in the process
   • The company depends on supervisors to build deep functional expertise in its new hires
     • also teach engineers how to write reports
     • succeeded in keeping its supervision fresh and engaging
     • Supervisors are deeply involved in their subordinates' work, without giving orders.
     • avoid making decisions for their subordinates
   • force engineers to think about and understand the problem before pursuing an alternative,
   • Student- mentor relationship

5. Integrative Leadears

   • Heavyweight project managers coordinate all the specialists from functional departments around a common project
   • Chief engineer
     • maintains full responsability for a single vehicle program but wields no direct power over the functions
     • demonstrate both exemplary technical expertise and fluency in synthesizing technical knowledge into clever, innovative designs
     • able to conceptualize whole systems.
     • staff of 5 to 15 engineers to assist them
     • he must "persuade" them to help him realize bis vision for the vehicle
     • see the broad picture clearly
       • leads to highly integrated designs
     • Design the entire process of developing the product
       • concept includes the major dimensions of the vehic
       • decisions on such major systems as the transmission
         • variety of models to he offered
         • the characteristics of the target customer
         • Sales projections
         • Targets on weight
         • Cost and fuel economy
       • work of the functions by planning how all the parts will work together as a cohesive whole

6. Standard Skills

   • relies primarily on training within the company
   • Training
     • key competency, worth developing internally rather than outsourcing.
     • intensive mentoring involved in direct supervision
       • Training center
     • excellent engineers but also teaches new hires
   • rotates most of its engineers within only one function,
     • they gain the experience that encourages standard work
     • create rigid functional boundaries
       • be the best in their function
     • To prevent the chimney effect's political conflicts, engineers at the bucho level are regularly rotated to areas outside their expertise.
       • Bucho level
         • the head of a functional division
         • Buchos
           • encourage their people to see the needs of the product as a whole

7. Flexible Work Standards

   • Tasks are preprogrammed so that one group knows what to expect from another and when to expect it
     • With little or no communication required
   • standardizing the tasks at each workstation to ensure that the work is done consistently and in a set amount of time
   • workstations can then be easily coordinated by a schedule
   • The actual standardized work plans are kept to a minimum; they often fit on a single sheet of paper.
     • consistent from model to model, but the implementation of the concept is individually designed for each vehicle program.
   • standards also save product developers the trouble of reinventing a new process for each individual project
   • standards also save product developers the trouble of reinventing a new process for each individual project

8. Living Design Standards

   • books of engineering checklists to guide design work
   • Engineering checklists contain detailed information
   • every part of the car body has a separate manufacturing checklist that shows what angles will produce a good part
   • use the checklists to guide the design throughout the development process
     • When an engineer learns something new, the knowledge is incorporated into a checklist and applied to all the company's vehicles
     • Engineering checklists also facilitate organizational learning across generations of vehicle

9. Managing Product Development as a System

   • these six mechanisms make up a whole system,
   • teaches young engineers bow to write and interpret reports, work with ebief engineers, and understand and use standards
   • the three types of standards interact and support one another to boost the pace of development;
   • a stable and long-term workforce, the company can afford to invest heavily in training and socializing its engineers

10. Typical solutions

    • For quality function deployment
      • Product development tools
      • Taguchi methods
    • Organizational
      • Keeping basic functional organization intact
      • Assigning people to temporary project teams

11. New solutions

    • Dramatic results
      • In marketplace
    • Cross functional coordination improvement
    • People spend less time within their functions
    • People rotate rapidly through positions

12. Japanese product development

    • Functionally based organization
    • Integration
    • Six organizational mechanisms
      • Social processes
        • Mutual adjustment
        • Close supervision
        • Integrative leadership from product heads
      • Standardization
        • Standard skills
        • Standard work processes
        • Design standards
    • Tightly linked product development system
      • Achieves
        • Cross functional coordination
        • Building functional expertise
        • Integration across projects