During world war two economy Toyota have no large budget to compete with US factories that used the latest mass production technique, due to this they used general purpose machines that could produce a wide variety of parts in small batches. By using ‘change over time ‘Toyota was able to produce entire automobiles by using small batches production. Shigeo Shingo initiated the concept of SMED (Single minute exchange of die) in order to work in small batches. He thought how machines were able to reduce changeover times that previously took hours to less than ten minutes. He did this not by asking workers but by reimagining and reconstructing the work needed to be done. Because of smaller batches now Toyota can produce wide diversity of products, it was no longer necessary that each product be exactly the same to gain large economies of scale that powered mass production.
Thus Toyota could serve its smaller, more fragmented markets and still compete with the mass producers.
Two important and famous words given by Toyota to work in smaller batches:
ANDON
In this workers have to ask for help soon if they notice any problem during production, without fixing that small issues they will not have permission to work on product development. This technique helps workers to work efficient way.
GENCHI GEMBUTSU
The meaning of this word is go and see yourself, the motive of this in Toyota that each worker has to go and understand by themselves how the product is working and they have to see how they will create value in perspective of customers.
After that we have to also look our reports and data to make workers more efficiently and achieve success for a company so below are the 3 A’S, companies should follow to make report up to date and more accessible.
Values of three A’S in company:
Actionable
For considering the reports to actionable, it must demonstrate clear cause and effect. Teams have to analyses all learning milestones, then judge what they have learned then take this reports to actionable to replicate results. This will help to understand
what the improvement you have done in product and how customers reacted to hat improvement.
Accessible
Sometimes many reports what we made are not understood by the employees and managers, so we have to try to remove all complexity in that reports by providing reports accessible to everyone and make connection between each employees and managers. By this we can find our data more valid towards customer’s feedback.
Auditable
For failure we always blame the messenger, the data, the manager, the Gods or anything else we can think of. That’s why third A ” Auditable,” is essential. We must ensure the data is credible to employees. After we need to test all data by hand by talking to customer, this will help what the fact managers are getting are credible or not. Then after auditing all reports try not to make complex so that it will easily understandable by employees and managers.