SYNOPSIS REPORT

ON
TOTAL QUALITY AND JUST IN
TIME
IN TOYOTA

Toyota Motor Corporation , commonly known simply as Toyota and abbreviated as TMC,
is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Toyota, Aichi, Japan. In 2009,
Toyota Motor Corporation employed 71,116 people worldwide (total Toyota 320,808).TMC
is the world's largest automobile manufacturer by sales and production.
The company was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 as a spinoff from his father's
company Toyota Industries to create automobiles. Three years earlier, in 1934, while still a
department of Toyota Industries, it created its first product, the Type A engine, and, in 1936,
its first passenger car, the Toyota AA. Toyota Motor Corporation group companies are
Toyota (including the Scion brand), Lexus, Daihatsu and Hino Motors, along with several
"non-automotive" companies. TMC is part of the Toyota Group, one of the largest
conglomerates in the world.
Toyota Motor Corporation is headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi and in Tokyo. In addition
to manufacturing automobiles, Toyota provides financial services through its Toyota
Financial Services division and also builds robots.
The Toyota Motor Company received its first Japanese Quality Control Award at the start of
the 1980s and began participating in a wide variety of motorsports. Due to the 1973 oil
crisis, consumers in the lucrative US market began turning to small cars with better fuel
economy. American car manufacturers had considered small economy cars to be an "entry
level" product, and their small vehicles employed a low level of quality in order to keep the
price low.

TQM is a management approach of an organization, centered on quality, based on the

participation of all its members and aiming at long-term success through customer
satisfaction, and benefits to all members of the organization and to society."
In

Japanese,

TQM

comprises

four

process

steps,

namely:

1. Kaizen Focuses on Continuous Process Improvement, to make processes visible,

repeatable and measureable. 2. Atarimae Hinshitsu Focuses on intangible effects on
processes and ways to optimize and reduce their effects. 3. Kansei Examining the way the
user applies the product leads to improvement in the product itself. 4. Miryokuteki
Hinshitsu Broadens management concern beyond the immediate product.
TQM requires that the company maintain this quality standard in all aspects of its business.
This requires ensuring that things are done right the first time and that defects and waste are
eliminated from operations.
Just-in-time' is a management philosophy and not a technique. It originally referred to the
production of goods to meet customer demand exactly, in time, quality and quantity, whether
the `customer' is the final purchaser of the product or another process further along the
production line. It has now come to mean producing with minimum waste. "Waste" is taken
in its most general sense and includes time and resources as well as materials. Elements of
JIT include:

Continuous improvement.
o Attacking fundamental problems - anything that does not add value to the
product.

o
o

Devising systems to identify problems.

Striving for simplicity - simpler systems may be easier to understand, easier to
manage and less likely to go wrong.

A product oriented layout - produces less time spent moving of materials and
parts.
o Quality control at source - each worker is responsible for the quality of their
own output.
o Poka-yoke - `foolproof' tools, methods, jigs etc. prevent mistakes
o Preventative maintenance, Total productive maintenance - ensuring machinery
and equipment functions perfectly when it is required, and continually
improving it.
Eliminating waste. There are seven types of waste:
o waste from overproduction.
o waste of waiting time.
o transportation waste.
o processing waste.
o inventory waste.
o waste of motion.
o waste from product defects.
Good housekeeping - workplace cleanliness and organisation.
Objective

The main objective is to study Toyotas approach in applying:

Total quality management

Just in time

The basic elements of JIT were developed by Toyota in the 1950s, and became known as the
Toyota Production System (TPS).The chief engineer Taiichi Ohno, a former shop manager
and eventually vice president of Toyota Motor Company at Toyota in the 1950s examined
accounting assumptions and realized that another method was possible. The factory could be
made more flexible, reducing the overhead costs of retooling and reducing the economic lot
size to the available warehouse space.
Over a period of several years, Toyota engineers redesigned car models for commonality of
tooling for such production processes as paint- spraying and welding. Toyota was one of the
first to apply flexible robotic systems for these tasks. Some of the changes were as simple as
standardizing the hole sizes used to hang parts on hooks. The number and types of fasteners
were reduced in order to standardize assembly steps and tools. In some cases, identical
subassemblies could be used in several models.
Toyota engineers then determined that the remaining critical bottleneck in the retooling
process was the time required to change the stamping dies used for body parts. These were
adjusted by hand, using crowbars and wrenches. It sometimes took as long as several days to
install a large (multiton) die set and adjust it for acceptable quality. Further, these were
usually installed one at a time by a team of experts, so that the line was down for several
weeks.
Toyota implemented a program called Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED). With very
simple fixtures, measurements were substituted for adjustments. Almost immediately, die
change times fell to about half an hour. At the same time, quality of the stampings became
5

controlled by a written recipe, reducing the skill required for the change. Analysis showed
that the remaining time was used to search for hand tools and move dies. Procedural changes
(such as moving the new die in place with the line in operation) and dedicated tool-racks
reduced the die-change times to as little as 40 seconds. Dies were changed in a ripple through
the factory as a new product began flowing.
After SMED, economic lot sizes fell to as little as one vehicle in some Toyota plants.
Carrying the process into parts -storage made it possible to store as little as one part in each
assembly station. When a part disappeared, that was used as a signal to produce or order a
replacement.
JIT was firmly in place in numerous Japanese plants by the early 1970s. JIT began to be
adopted in the U.S. in the 1980s.

Sources of data
www.hbs.edu/research/fac pubs/workingpapers/papers2/.../02-043.doc
http://www.oppapers.com/subjects/tqm-toyota-page1.html

top-pdf.com/toyota-and-tqm.html
http://www.1000advices.com/guru/processes_lean_tps_7principles.html
http://en.oboulo.com/total+quality+management+and+toyot a
http://books.google.co.in/books?
id=TxJNaPkuc4oC&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq=TQM+an+JIT+at+toyota&source=
bl&ots=BlFnLNH5iH&sig=Bdi3JG29SXka0v3Zq5TY4EcQLK4&hl=en&ei=SjgHTa
D5H4mzrAfkzcWDDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQ
6AEwADgU
sspear@hbs.edu ( working paper 02-04,Steven Spear )