The Toyota problem: Where the car giant went wrong
Over the past few
decades, Toyota has built a
strong presence in the United States by serving its
consumers well and doing what the US government has wanted. Now, it has
stumbled badly, largely because it's greatest strength - the Toyota way of "accumulation
of small improvements," or kaizen philosophy - has turned out to be a weakness
in the age of complex electronic engines.
There is every reason to believe
Toyota will fix its technical and management problems. The question is whether,
panicking in the very un-Japanese glare of the American media and political
spotlight, it will dig a deeper hole by losing the air of trust and reputation
for competence among customers it has spent so long building up. That would be
bad for Toyota and for America.
Most auto companies in the past,
including Ford and GM, have had recall problems like Toyota. They all seem to
try to hide the early evidence of flaws, even if they affect safety. This goes
back to the American consumer advocate Ralph Nader's "unsafe at any speed"
campaign in the US in 1965 that involved the Chevrolet Corvair
produced by GM.
But what we are seeing may be a
more fundamental problem that has to do with the engine control unit as a
whole. In an average Toyota, there are about 24,000 inputs and outputs, with as
many as 70 computer chips processing information and sending it on to other
chips to operate the engine control units. It is a very complex system.
Such complex systems are a problem
these days for all auto manufacturers - Germans and Americans as well as
Japanese - because about 60 percent of a modern automobile is electronics.
Toyota is the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, since it is the world's
largest manufacturer of cars, with more than 50 plants across the globe outside
Japan. Toyota has been expanding so rapidly it has more models on the road than
any other carmaker.
What we see with
Toyota in particular is that this new electronic complexity has overwhelmed its
famous concept of kaizen - the accumulation of small improvements - that has
made Toyota such a quality brand worldwide. This company has so perfected the
practice of kaizen from the bottom up at the assembly line that it has lost the
big picture of how the whole electronic engine - and thus overall safety -
works.
If Toyota does not recognize this
and tries to chalk all its problems up to floor mats touching the accelerator,
or resetting a computer, it will miss the real issue. Where Toyota has failed
is that rather than review the overall safety of the engine operating unit, it
has focused instead on diagnosing the function of many thousands of pieces of
an electronic engine.
What this company is missing is
the human factor - a single person who has a comprehensive understanding of the
details of the engine and how the parts interact and work as a whole.
In the old days,
one chief engineer used to design everything. This was true with ships and
airplanes as well as nuclear reactors. Now, design and production is broken
down into so many details that there is no one in the current generation of
Toyota engineers who seems to have the whole picture. A 45-year-old engineer at
Toyota today would have spent the past 25 years working on "the accumulation of
small improvements."
What this
suggests is that Toyota has to come up with a new organizational ethos beyond
kaizen that can oversee the crucial safety features that may have been
compromised by so much incremental improvement over the years. This is a
philosophical problem of management, not a technical issue. A new system of man
and machine interface needs to supplement the kaizen philosophy - in other
words one that perfects the big picture of engine control safety instead of
just the small picture of components.