Article 2
March 15, 2001
Toyota Must Maintain Edge on Quality
As It Tries to Step Up U.S. Production
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
KALAMAZOO, Mich. -- Why do Toyota Motor Corp. cars and trucks rank
at the top of auto-industry quality scorecards year after year, despite massive
catch-up efforts by Detroit's Big Three? Hajime Oba and his hair dryer offer
a clue.
Armed with a $12 dryer from a discount store, Mr. Oba proved to engineers
from Michigan's Summit Polymers Inc. that their $280,000 investment in
sleek robots and a paint oven to bake the dashboard vents they produce
actually was undermining quality and pushing up costs. The fancy equipment
took up to 90 minutes to dry the paint and in the bargain caused quality flaws
because parts gathered dust as they crept along a convey or.Mr. Oba's hair
dryer did the job in less than three minutes. Chastened, Summit's engineers
replaced their paint system with some $150 spray guns and a few light bulbs
for drying and integrated the painting into the final assembly process. Along
with some other changes inspired by Mr. Oba's visits, family-owned Summit
cut its defect rate to less than 60 per million parts from 3,000 per million in
the mid-1990s.
Victories like this are critical to Mr. Oba's mission to transform Toyota's
American auto-parts suppliers into lean, high-quality manufacturers. And
Mr. Oba's work, in turn, is key to Toyota's plans to accelerate a longstanding
shift in its global production away from Japan. By the end of this decade, the
Japanese giant wants to boost its North American capacity by 60% to 2
million vehicles a year from 1.3 million. Pulling off that feat, which would
put Toyota in position to displace DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler unit as
America's No. 3 auto maker, has acquired new urgency as Japan's economy
has continued to spiral.
Toyota's not-so-secret weapon in reaching this goal is its reputation for
bullet-proof quality. For six straight years, Toyota has dominated a survey of
the most-durable cars sold in America compiled by J.D. Power and
Associates from surveys of owners of four- to five-year-old vehicles. Toyota
vehicles routinely score well in other influential product-quality scorecards.
Just Thursday, for instance, Consumer Reports is naming four Toyota models
to its top-ten list of vehicles for 2001, ranked by reliability and performance
-- the most of any manufacturer.
Looking for an Edge
As the U.S. auto industry cools and consumers look for vehicles that give
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them more value for their buck, the companies with the best quality image
will be in position to grab more market share from the laggards. But
maintaining this edge won't be easy. As Toyota expands its U.S. output, it
will be forced to rely more on American suppliers who haven't grown up
steeped in the auto maker's obsessive production philosophy, known as "lean
manufacturing."
What's more, Detroit's auto makers, which have been trying to copy Toyota
since the mid-1980s, have been closing the quality gap somewhat lately. For
instance, General Motors Corp. has seen an indicator called "direct run rate,"

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- Spring '08
- Staff
- Toyota Production System, Mr. Oba
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