As Toyota Closes In on GM, Quality Concerns Also Grow
TOYOTA CITY, Japan -- Toyota Motor Corp., one of the most successful companies in the world, is scrambling to overhaul itself.
After nearly doubling its revenue in the past decade and redefining competition in key parts of the auto business, Toyota suddenly finds itself confronting mushrooming quality problems. Torrid growth has spread thin the company's famed Japanese quality gurus. This means that, in places like Toyota's Georgetown, Ky., plant, the pressure is on to retrain American workers to take up more of the slack. At the same time, Toyota has launched a world-wide campaign to simplify its production systems.
By many measures, Toyota is still barreling along. The company's net income of $10.49 billion in yen in the year ended March 31 not only exceeded those of rivals General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. combined, but set a record for any Japanese company. Toyota continued the trend yesterday, reporting a 29% rise in net income for the quarter ended June 30, to $2.59 billion, up from $2.01 billion in the year-earlier period. Group sales rose 10% to $40.78 billion.
Toyota's next big goal is to expand its share of the global market to 15% over the next decade, from 10% now. That would make Toyota roughly the same size No. 1 auto maker GM is today.
But there are signs that the company's ambitious growth agenda is straining human and technical resources and undercutting quality, one of Toyota's most critical strategic advantages. It is the kind of paradox many highly successful companies face: Getting bigger doesn't always mean getting better.
Toyota still tends to outscore most rivals, including Detroit's Big Three auto makers and European brands, on industry surveys of quality and reliability. But Toyota's lead has narrowed and in certain key segments disappeared. "Toyota quality isn't improving as fast as it should," Toyota's president, Fujio Cho, concedes in an interview.
To stop the quality slide, Mr. Cho says Toyota has launched multiple "special task forces" at trouble spots in places such as North America and China to overhaul shop-floor management. Toyota also has established a Global Production Center in Toyota City to train midlevel factory managers so they can more effectively run plants outside Japan. Toyota now is re-evaluating some of its most fundamental operating strategies.
"We are getting back to basics," says Gary Convis, a Toyota managing officer, who is also president of the Georgetown plant.
An important part of that effort focuses not on machines or high-speed information technology, but on replicating a special class of people who were instrumental in making Toyota a manufacturing powerhouse during the past 25 years.
When Toyota first began opening factories in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, kicking off its dramatic global expansion, some of the most important people in the new plants weren't top executives, but midlevel Japanese managers commonly known as coordinators.
These coordinators were experts in Toyota's lean-manufacturing techniques and philosophies, commonly known as the Toyota Production System, or TPS. These coordinators, usually with 20 or more years of experience, generally shunned classrooms. Instead they trained American shop-floor managers and hourly associates by attacking issues directly on the assembly line.
A central concept was that there is an endless possibility for kaizen, or continuous improvement, in every process. The Toyota coordinators tried to make each worker a "thinking machine," capable of constant learning.
The principles behind lean production took shape over five decades, starting with efforts in the 1930s by one of the company's founding fathers, Kiichiro Toyoda. The Toyota system took its current form during the 1950s with the leadership of Taiichi Ohno, a legendary Toyota engineer who drew inspiration from a trip to the U.S. during which he watched how a supermarket stocked its shelves using a just-in-time delivery of goods.
Mr. Ohno preached there are seven forms of muda, or waste, in any process. When Mr. Ohno trained recruits to Toyota's elite Operations Management Consulting Division, he drew a chalk circle on the floor in front of a process on the assembly line and told the trainee to watch that job until he could identify how it could be improved. A trainee could stand for nearly a day before he was able to satisfy Mr. Ohno with his answer.
When Mr. Ohno began applying his production approach full-scale, Toyota factories achieved huge gains in productivity and efficiency. The marriage of efficient production to an obsessive concern for quality helped Toyota establish a reputation for bullet-proof reliability that remains a huge competitive advantage.
By the late 1980s, lean production was a deeply entrenched way of life at Toyota, governing just about every aspect of its corporate activities.
Hajime Oba, a retired TPS guru who still works for the company in North America on a project-by-project basis, likens the system to a form of religion. Managers at Detroit's Big Three auto makers, he says, use lean techniques simply as a way to slash inventory. "What [they] are doing is creating a Buddha image and forgetting to inject soul in it," Mr. Oba says.
But as years went by, Toyota discovered that its corporate faith was getting watered down as the company spread its operations world-wide and hired generations of employees ever more distant from Mr. Ohno.
A case in point is Toyota's massive factory in Georgetown, Ky., the first plant the auto maker built in the U.S. from the ground up.
Georgetown began production in 1986, and throughout the 1990s the plant routinely claimed the top spots in J.D. Power & Associates' widely watched initial quality survey for cars sold in the U.S.
But after being named North America's second-best plant in 2001 behind Toyota's Canadian plant in Cambridge, Ontario, Georgetown has slumped. This year, it ranked No. 14, after placing No. 15 in 2003 and No. 26 in 2002. Two GM plants in Michigan, the Lansing Grand River Cadillac factory and a large car plant in Hamtramck, and Ford's luxury-car factory in Wixom, Mich., were North America's top three plants this year.
One big problem that Georgetown faced all along has been language. Most of the Toyota-production-system masters speak fluently only in Japanese. Most of their American employees speak only English. The linguistic and cultural barriers make deep discussions on lean production almost impossible and can cause other problems. One executive coordinator on his second tour in the U.S. as a TPS evangelist says he left his wife and sons back in Japan because his boys were "becoming too Americanized."
Another issue is time -- or the lack of it. As sales of Toyota vehicles in the North American market took off, Toyota factories had to ramp up quickly to keep up with demand. That meant a plant like Georgetown had to rapidly promote American shop-floor managers and hourly associates, instead of nurturing them gradually in the Toyota manufacturing way and deepening their skills and knowledge.
"Demand for ... high volumes saps your energy," says Mr. Convis. "Over a period of time, it eroded our focus." High turnover among workers and managers on the shop floor also "thinned out the expertise and knowledge we painstakingly built up over the years."
But by far the biggest headache at Georgetown now stems from a scarcity of TPS coordinators from Japan.
As the auto maker stepped up the pace of factory openings globally, those expansion plans meant fewer coordinators for older, more established plants like Georgetown.
At Georgetown, one glaring symptom of trouble, its top executives say, is that some hourly assemblers began ignoring standardized work processes -- considered one of the biggest sins inside Toyota plants because of the impact on the consistency and accuracy of manufacturing.
Georgetown also lost some lean-production masters to age and competitors. Kazumi Nakada, a TPS master, worked in tandem with Mr. Cho, the then-Georgetown president, to launch Georgetown in the mid-1980s. But Mr. Nakada left Toyota in 1995 to join GM, which was intensifying its efforts to catch up with Toyota in vehicle quality by copying its manufacturing methods. Mr. Nakada worked at GM overhauling its manufacturing system in Europe and now works for the big auto-parts maker, Delphi Corp., a former GM unit whose leaders are vigorous Toyota Production System converts.
By the time Mr. Convis arrived at Georgetown in mid-2000 from the GM-Toyota plant in California, Georgetown was showing signs of trouble. Yet the plant's management was in charge of leading Toyota's effort to set up a pickup-truck plant in Tijuana, Mexico. Mr. Convis asked his superiors in Japan for help, in the form of TPS masters who could work on the Mexico project. The reply was a "flat no," Mr. Convis says.
That was "a real wakeup call," Mr. Convis says.
To shore up Georgetown's mastery of lean production to a level where it could function without relying so much on Japanese TPS coordinators, the plant's top management circle launched an emergency 18-month project in 2000 in order to gradually build back up the core of its front-line managers. The effort has since continued as a more formalized Organization Development Group.
Mr. Convis recruited Mr. Oba, the TPS guru, to help implement the Georgetown project. Among other issues, Mr. Oba found many shop-floor leaders would spend too much time in their offices, instead of prowling the factory floor coaching and leading kaizen projects with assembly workers.
To shake things up, Mr. Convis and Mr. Oba dragged about 70 midlevel managers through projects at various Toyota parts suppliers for "real life" kaizen. The goal was in part to "embarrass the hell out of them" in front of suppliers whom they had been used to bossing around, says Mr. Oba, to highlight the need for them to learn more about TPS.
Still, in 2002, Georgetown suffered one of the biggest blows to its track record for quality. The plant began pumping out the new Camry sedan in the fall of 2001, and soon buyers began griping about the car's spongy brakes and cup holders that interfered with the shift lever when a tall travel mug was placed in them. Long skinny plastic strips, called "Mohican molding," that covered up weld marks on the car's roof also sometimes peeled off, in part because of lack of testing.
Those problems helped to send the number of customer complaints about the quality of the new Camry soaring in the annual initial quality survey by J.D. Power. In 2002, the car had 117 problems per 100 vehicles and was the sixth-best vehicle in the survey's "premium midsize car" category. Just two years earlier, in 2000, the Camry was America's best vehicle in that segment.
Since then, the Camry's initial quality ranking has declined to No. 7 in 2003 and No. 8 in 2004 despite the fact that the number of customer complaints declined, placing the car well behind rivals such as the Buick Century and the Chevy Monte Carlo.
Now, with some rivals closing the gap in efficiency and quality, Toyota is scrambling to take lean production to a new level -- one that is simple enough to function without the constant help of Japanese coordinators with 20 years of experience or more in lean production.
The company, among other efforts, is trying to augment its traditional hands-on approach to teaching TPS principles with more systematic and easier-to-understand tools, such as TPS manuals.
In Toyota City, Toyota's Global Production Center aims to train shop-floor leaders for Toyota factories outside Japan. Inside the center is a mock assembly line where trainees can learn TPS principles by, among other methods, watching videos of an "ideal" standardized way to handle an assembly process.
Another related effort is the Organization Development Group Mr. Convis helped set up at Georgetown, which aims to more slowly and extensively nurture American shop-floor managers in TPS and create future leaders of the plant who won't have to rely on Japanese TPS gurus to run day-to-day operations. A similar effort is also going on at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., the plant in Fremont, California, Toyota owns jointly with GM.
But the most critical part of the effort is on display in a new assembly system at Toyota's Tsutsumi plant in Toyota City -- a new standard-bearer of the Toyota production way that is now being spread to North America and China, among other places.
A typical assembly line is lined with makeshift shelves. At most Toyota plants, those racks hold just 80 minutes worth of components. With several different models coming down the same line (Tsutsumi makes six to seven different models in both of its assembly lines), workers have to be sure to pick the right parts from the shelves. That can mean sorting through more than two dozen versions of the same basic components in some cases.
Tsutsumi eliminated almost all the parts shelves that used to flank the plant's snaking assembly line and designed a system where logistics workers synchronize packages of parts according to the order of vehicles heading down the assembly line and deliver them in foot-long or smaller containers placed inside a welded vehicle body. Assembly workers simply pick up parts from those containers according to the way they are laid out, without having to choose the right component from a parts shelf.
Error proofing, or what Toyota calls "poke yoke," (po-kay yo-kay) is increasingly important for the auto maker, because as the company's plants began sprouting around the world, it has learned it can't count on having a work force that is as steeped in Toyota's traditions, or as loyal and motivated, as Toyota City factory workers, whose quality and efficiency amazed rivals in the early 1980s.
At the Fremont, Calif., plant Toyota jointly operates and owns with GM, turnover is as high as 8%, compared with 2% at Toyota's Japanese plants. Georgetown is the first large-scale Toyota plant outside Japan trying to take lessons from the new production system devised at the Tsutsumi plant. In one work area on Georgetown's No. 1 assembly line, where it builds a Camry or Avalon every 58 seconds, an operator used to have to make multiple decisions in choosing particular visors and seatbelts from the parts bin with 24 kinds of visors and nine different seatbelts, depending on a vehicle.
Georgetown wanted to limit the number of decisions an hourly worker makes to two or less per vehicle. So under a new system installed earlier this year after months of preparation, the same operator now receives parts for each vehicle in a small plastic container. In that container are a set of visors and seatbelts that match the car in front of the worker at that moment. The result: The operator makes "zero decisions" in picking parts, says John Stewart, a manager at Georgetown.
"This reduced the mental burden on our team members," says Mr. Stewart. In each work area, Mr. Stewart and other shop managers work on three areas: "smooth flow, memory simple and motion simple," he says.
丰田汽车占有率扩大难掩质量尴尬
丰田汽车公司(Toyota Motor Corp.)是世界最成功的企业之一，但它却正忙于给自己动大手术。
丰田汽车的收入在过去10年中增长了近一倍，汽车工业许多重要领域的竞争格局都因该公司的崛起而发生了改变，然而突然之间，丰田汽车却发现自己正面临著层出不穷的质量问题。日本货的高质量举世闻名，但由于业务的快速增长，丰田汽车作为日本质量代名词的形象却日渐失去了光彩。这意味著，在肯塔基州乔治城的丰田汽车装配厂这类地方，丰田汽车公司为了使其美国工人在生产上做到精益求精，将不得不对他们进行重新培训。与此同时，丰田汽车也在全球范围内发起了简化其生产方式的运动。
不过就许多方面而言，丰田汽车的业务仍在高速成长。在截至3月31日的财政年度内，丰田汽车的净利润达到了104.9亿美元，不仅超过了通用汽车公司(General Motors Corp.)和福特汽车公司(Ford Motor Co.)的总和，而且也创下了日本企业年度净利润的最高纪录。这一良好势头仍在持续，丰田汽车周三宣布，在截至6月30日的财政季度，公司净利润为25.9亿美元，较上年同期的20.1亿美元增长了29%。集团销售额同期增长了10%，达到407.8亿美元。
丰田汽车的下一个目标是，要在未来10年中将其在全球汽车市场的占有率由目前的10%提高到15%。届时丰田汽车的市场占有率将与世界最大汽车生产商通用汽车目前的水平大体相当。
但已有迹象显示，丰田汽车雄心勃勃的增长计划正使其在人力和技术资源方面渐显力不从心，并使其产品质量受到了损害，而质量正是丰田汽车最重要的一项战略优势。该公司正面临许多大获成功的企业都曾遭遇过的尴尬处境：在企业规模扩大的同时企业质量却未同步提高。
汽车业进行的产品质量和可靠性调查显示，丰田汽车仍然领先于多数竞争对手，美国三大汽车制造商和欧洲的汽车生产商都是其手下败将。但丰田汽车的领先优势已经缩小，在某些重要领域甚至已丧失了领先地位。丰田汽车公司总裁张富士夫(Fujio Cho)在一次访谈中承认，丰田汽车在提高产品质量方面并不尽如人意。
张富士夫说，为了制止产品质量的下滑，丰田汽车已在出现产品质量问题的北美和中国等地成立了许多“特别工作组”，以大力改善生产现场的管理。丰田汽车还在丰田市建立了一个全球生产中心(Global Production Center)，对公司中层的工厂经理进行培训，以便他们能更有效地管理丰田汽车在日本以外的工厂。该公司目前还在对其一些最基本的运营策略进行再评估。
丰田汽车乔治城工厂的总裁盖瑞?康维斯(Gary Convis)说：“我们正重新开始从最基本的事情上抓起。”
这一努力的重点不是用信息技术来改造企业，而是要再造一批像过去25年来在丰田成为汽车制造业巨擘过程中立下汗马功劳的人。
当丰田汽车上世纪80年代中期开始在美国设厂时，这些新工厂中最重要的一批人并非高层管理人士，而是那些来自日本的中层经理，他们一般被称做协调人。
这些协调人对被称做丰田生产方式(TPS)的精益制造技术和理念烂熟于心。这些通常都有20年以上工作经验的人一般不会在教室里向人们传道授业，相反，他们会在生产线旁随时指出美国的生产经理和普通工人工作中的错误，随时随地对他们展开培训。
他们这样做的中心理念就是，对工作的每一个环节持续进行改进的可能性都是无止境的。丰田的协调人试图使每一名工人都成为“会思考的机器”，使他们具备不断学习的能力。
精益制造的基本原则是用五十多年的时间形成的，丰田汽车的创始人之一丰田喜一郎(Kiichiro Toyoda)在上世纪30年代为其打下了第一块基石。在大野耐一(Taiichi Ohno)这位传奇性工程师的领导下，丰田生产方式在上世纪五十年代基本成形。大野耐一的灵感来自一次美国之行，当时他看到美国的超市用应时配送方式进货。
大野耐一宣称，在任何过程中都会有七种类型的浪费。当大野耐一培训丰田汽车的员工时，他会用粉笔在生产线旁的地上划一个圆圈，同时告诉被培训人注意观察他划圈的过程，然后找出改进之道。有些被培训人在那里站了将近一天才能得出令大野耐一满意的答案。
当大野耐一开始全面推行其丰田生产方式后，丰田汽车的各工厂在生产力和生产效率方面取得了巨大进步。将高效生产和注重质量相结合，使丰田所产汽车的可靠性获得了万无一失的美誉，直到今天这仍是该公司的一项竞争优势。
到上世纪八十年代末，精益制造的理念已经在丰田汽车公司生根，它主导著该公司所有的业务活动。
Hajime Oba是丰田汽车公司的一位退休员工，他是丰田生产方式的最早实践者之一，目前仍时常临时受雇于丰田汽车的北美业务。他把丰田生产方式比做一种宗教。
他说，美国三大汽车公司的经理们只将精益制造技术当作是削减库存的一种方式，他们学习丰田生产方式是只得其形，未得其神。
但随著时间的推移，当丰田汽车的业务逐渐遍及全球，新招募的员工距大野耐一生活的时代越来越远之时，该公司发现自己所尊崇的丰田生产方式也开始走形了。
在丰田汽车位于肯塔基州乔治城的工厂就能发现这一点。它是丰田汽车公司在美国建立的第一家工厂。
乔治城工厂于1986年投产，在整个九十年代，这家工厂的产品质量一直位列J.D. Power & Associates质量排行榜的榜首。J.D. Power & Associates对在美国所售车辆进行的首次质量调查受到各方的广泛关注。
然而，自从2001年被命名为北美第二优秀的工厂后(名列第一的是丰田汽车在加拿大安大略省的工厂)，乔治城工厂的排名就开始一路下滑。今年它仅排名第14位，去年和前年的排名更惨，只分别排名第15位和第26位。今年排名位居前三的是通用汽车公司的两家工厂和福特汽车公司在密歇根州Wixom的豪华轿车生产厂。
语言一直是乔治城工厂面临的一大难题。丰田生产方式的传授者多数只能讲日语，而丰田汽车在美国的员工大多又只会说英语。语言和文化上的障碍使深入探讨精益制造技术几乎成为不可能的事情。一位第二次来美国传播丰田生产方式的日本籍管理人士说，这次他把妻子和儿子们留在了日本，因为他的儿子们已经变得“过于美国化了”。
另一个问题是时间，或者说缺乏时间。随著丰田汽车在北美的销量大幅增长，该公司各工厂不得不加快生产节奏以满足市场需求。这意味著它在乔治城等地的工厂不得不迅速提拔美国籍的工厂经理和工人，而没有时间让他们逐渐熟悉丰田汽车的生产方式，以及深化他们的技能和知识。
但截至目前，乔治城工厂面临的最大难题是日本籍丰田生产方式协调员严重不足。
丰田汽车全球扩张的速度日益加快，新厂越开越多，这就意味著乔治城这样的根基深厚的老厂里的协调员越来越少。
乔治城工厂的一位高级管理人员称，最突出的问题就是一些按小时计酬的装配员工开始忽视标准化工作程序。这在丰田汽车厂来看是最严重的问题，因为这会影响到生产的连贯性和准确性。
员工年龄增长和竞争对手挖墙角使乔治城工厂失去了一些技艺高超的精益制造大师。Kazumi Nakada就是其中的一位。他曾与张富士夫共事，曾任乔治城工厂的总裁，为丰田汽车八十年代中期初建乔治城工厂立下过汗马功劳。但在1995年，他离开丰田汽车加盟通用汽车，当时通用汽车一直在努力效仿丰田汽车的生产模式，力求追赶丰田汽车的质量水平。在通用汽车工作期间，Nakada整顿了通用的欧洲生产系统。目前他在大型汽车零部件生产商德尔福(Delphi Corp.)工作，德尔福曾经是通用汽车的子公司，公司领导人都是丰田生产方式的拥趸。
2000年中期，康维斯从通用-丰田的加州生产厂抵达乔治城工厂时，一些难题已经初现倪端。当时工厂管理层正负责在墨西哥Tijuana新建一家丰田小型卡车生产厂，康维斯向他的日本上司求救，要求往墨西哥项目派遣一些精通丰田生产方式的协调人员，但被断然否决了。
康维斯说，那时他才真正警醒。
为了提高乔治城工厂对精益制造理念的掌握，以便实现独立运作，不再过分依赖日本派来的丰田生产方式协调员，工厂管理层于2000年启动了一个为期18个月的紧急项目，逐步培养核心的一线经理人员。这个项目一直持续下来，如今已经定名为更加正式的组织发展部(Organization Development Group)。
康维斯请来了丰田生产方式大师Oba，一同在乔治城工厂推行这个项目。Oba发现很多一线管理人员常常坐在办公室里，而不是在生产区巡视，指导、带领装配工人不断改进工作。
为了改变这种局面，康维斯和Oba从不同的丰田零部件供应商那里陆续请来了大约70名中层经理，来进行现场指导。Oba说，这种做法的一个目的就是当著这些供应商的面，扫一扫这些一线经理们的面子。以往，他们在供应商面前总是端著一副老板的架子。这样做是为了向他们强调深入学习丰田生产方式的必要性。
可是，2002年乔治城工厂还是遭受了一次最严重的产品质量打击。该厂从2001年秋季开始生产丰田佳美(Camry)小轿车。很快车主就开始纷纷投诉刹车偏软，杯架上如果放个较大的旅行杯就很容易和变速杆撞上。车顶上覆盖焊点的塑胶条也常常掉下来，部分原因就是没有进行充分的测试。
这些问题导致车主投诉数量大增，根据J.D. Power所做的年度初次质量调查，2002年每100辆丰田佳美轿车中就有117处故障，在高档中型车排名中位列第六。而短短两年前，也就是2000年，丰田佳美还是这个级别车型美国市场上的冠军。
此后，2003年佳美排名落到第七，2004年更是掉到第八。虽然车主投诉数量实际上有所减少，但佳美还是远远落后于别克(Buick)的Century和雪佛兰(Chevy)的蒙特卡罗(Monte Carlo)。
现在，竞争对手们已经逐渐拉近了同丰田汽车在生产效率和产品质量上的差距，丰田于是尽力将精益制造水平推上一个新台阶，一种无需具备20多年精益制造经验的日藉协调员长期帮助也能够独立运作的生产工艺。
众多举措中，丰田汽车正在尽力增加以往手把手传授的方式，辅以更系统化，更容易理解的方式来推广丰田生产方式的理念，例如丰田生产方式手册。
在丰田市，丰田全球生产中心的任务之一就是为日本以外生产厂培训一线经理。在中心内有一条模拟生产线，受训人员可以通过观看录像等多种方式学习丰田生产方式的原则，录像会展示掌握一套生产装配过程“理想”的标准过程。
另一项举措就是康维斯在乔治城工厂主持建立的组织开发部，此举旨在逐步增加对美国一线生产经理的培训，使他们更深入地体会了解丰田生产方式，培养以后无需仰仗日藉协调员就能主持日常生产经营的领导人。在丰田汽车与通用汽车于加州弗里蒙特合资兴建的New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.里，也有一个类似乔治城工厂的项目。
但最关键的一项举措还是在丰田市的Tsutsumi工厂展示一套全新的生产系统。这套新的丰田生产标准已经传播到北美和中国等地。
一条典型的生产线往往都配置一套临时组合的货架。在大多数丰田生产车间里，这些货架上摆放的零部件足够生产线运转80分钟所需。一般每条生产线都装配好几种车型，Tsutsumi的每条生产线就装配6-7个车型。生产线上的工人必须能从货架上准确取出所需零件，这意味著他们有时需要从20多种同类零件中挑选出正确的一种。
Tsutsumi工厂几乎全数取消了这种生产线搭配的货架，新设计出一套系统，负责物流的员工可以根据沿著生产线下来的具体车型同步提供所需零件，然后放到车身内一个1英尺大小的盒子里。后面生产线上的工人只需从车身里的盒子内根据零件放置的方式取出零件进行装配即可，根本无需再费心从货架上挑选零件。
防错步骤对丰田汽车来说越来越重要了。生产厂在世界各地不断兴建，公司已经认识到，各地员工不可能都像丰田市生产厂的员工一样严格遵守丰田传统，不会像他们一样忠心耿耿，也不能对各地员工采用同一套激励机制。丰田市工人的生产质量和工作效率曾经在八十年代初期让所有竞争对手震惊不已。
在加州弗里蒙特的丰田和通用合资厂，员工流失率高达8%，而丰田日本生产厂的员工流失率只有2%。乔治城工厂是丰田汽车在日本以外第一家正在学习借鉴Tsutsumi工厂新开发的生产体系的大型生产厂。乔治城工厂的1号装配线同时生产佳美和Avalon两个车型号，每58秒出产一辆。在这条线上的某个工作区，以前操作员要根据转到眼前的车型，在零件箱中从24种遮阳板和9种安全带中挑选适用的零件。
乔治城工厂计划把这些时薪工人根据每辆车作出决策的数量限制在2次以下。经过几个月的试运行，今年年初他们启用了一套新程序，同样的操作员现在只需从眼前每辆车中的塑料盒子里取出零件直接装配就行了，盒子里是根据这个车型刚刚放进去的一套遮阳板和安全带。乔治城工厂的经理斯图尔特(John Stewart)说，这样工人根本不用考虑挑选零件这件事了。
他说，这减轻了工人的脑力负担。斯图尔特和其他一线经理在每个工作区域巡视，重点关注三个问题：生产线流畅运转，工人只需简单记忆，只需作出简单动作。
