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February 17, 2010
- ISBN13: 9780071615495
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The Toyota Production System is the benchmark used throughout the world for “lean” thinking. Now you can model your own processes after those of the company that “wrote the book on supply chain management.” Written by two experts on the subject, along with a former Toyota senior executive, this book details the most celebrated supply chain operation in the world to help you form an integrated, synchronized system that will b… More >>
Toyota’s Supply Chain Management: A Strategic Approach to Toyota’s Renowned System
read comments (4)
February 17th, 2010 at 2:15 am
The authors use “Toyota’s Supply Chain Management” to explain how Toyota implements its Toyota Production System in automobile manufacture. Variety is chosen carefully to balance market demands and operational efficiency. Reducing variability enables all of the supply chain flows to operate with low levels of inventory. Visibility ensures that bottlenecks are noted and responses immediate. Toyota performance metrics have a 50% weight for results and a 50% weight for process compliance. Flexibility is emphasized throughout.
One approach used at Toyota to reduce build combinations is to include many standard equipment options, based on the model selected. Rental sales volume allows automakers to fill in demand valleys during the year. North American production for Toyota is typically allocated and assigned to dealers 2-4 weeks prior to production. Some accessories can be added in the marshaling yard.
Overseas production distribution for North America takes 3 – 5 weeks to get to American ports, another 2-7 days to get to the dealers. Vehicles are first allocated to a required area prior to being loaded onto the ships (different ships go to different ports – Portland, Long Beach, Houston, Jacksonville, and Newark), then allocated and assigned to dealers in transit to the port.
Tier 1 suppliers make parts and ship directly to the assembly plants; Tier 2 link to Tier 1, etc. Toyota takes charge of pickup and transportation of parts from suppliers to plants – routes are designed for parts to be picked up from multiple suppliers for multiple plants and delivered to regional cross-dock operations. To ensure that both trucking and rail companies have adequate capacity, day-to-day forecasts of volume by destination are provided.
Dealer allocation occurs twice each month, 4-5 weeks prior to the scheduled build dates. Vehicles for the day are pre-sequenced so that vehicles high extra workloads (eg. sunroofs) are not scheduled back to back. A plant’s freeze point ranges from 5-10 days out, selected so 80% of supplies arrive within that point. Line speed changes with 1-2 months lead time. Flexibility is improved by purchasing option-related parts from suppliers located closer to the assembly plant.
Complexity reduction is achieved through parts commonality, making high-volume options standard, eliminating options that don’t sell well, designing accessories that can be installed after the vehicle leaves the factory, limiting product offering within a market area – eg. stick shifts sell well in Europe but not the U.S., combining related options into related packages (eg. safety) – these actions also simplify buying and retail stocking.
Most Toyota plants employ some percentage of temporary workers to support normal production; if demand slows they can be reduced. The percent of time production is planned for normal rate is usually set at less than 100% to allow stopping for quality problems. (Lines are stopped about 5,000 times/day in Toyota’s Kentucky plant.) Fast die changes are another source of flexibility, body-shop robots have flexibility to handle different models, painting occurs in small batches to limit nozzle cleaning (emits pollutants). Less than ten out of 353 assembly steps use sequence suppliers (eg. seats). Workers rotate tasks every two yours to reduce monotony and to use different muscle sets. Of the 20 hours required to make a car, about 9 are spent in the paint shop.
Suppliers rank Original Equipment Manufacturers on 17 criteria, including trust, timely information, degree of help to decrease costs – Toyota is highest (407) vs. G.M. (lowest at 131). G.M. has a 5X (highest) emphasis on cost reduction vs. quality, Honda and Toyota the lowest at 1.7X. Toyota has a higher number of engineers helping suppliers and vice-versa (re design) than others.
In Japan, 85% of volume comes from suppliers within 50-miles (one hour) radius; in North America the goal is for 80% parts delivered within 3-5 days lead time. Suppliers have to share ideas with other suppliers making the same item.
Toyota’s promotion costs for cars are less than $700/vehicle, vs. over $2,500 for others. In a crisis (eg. dock strike, single supplier problem), someone is assigned ownership of the problem so things don’t slip between the cracks.
Rating: 5 / 5
February 17th, 2010 at 2:44 am
This book has very little actual practical application in it based upon how TOYOTA truly does business and runs the TOYOTA “Supply Chain” areas. As someone who worked at TOYOTA for MANY years learning and applying TPS / TBS to distribution and supply chain throughout the company all over the world, I am amused and disgusted by this book almost equally. As most books written on TOYOTA and TPS, this one is also written by outside scholars that did not live it, learn it, plan it, create it, apply it, check it, tweak it, and go through tens of thousands of reps in order to keep working toward enacting and sustaining the core TOYOTA Guiding Principles every day. They did try to sprinkle in some “credibility” by throwing in the marketing snippet about teaming up with a TOYOTA executive on this book. The fact that the authors cannot even get TAKT time or the application concept correct, should be a red flag to anyone who knows the basics of the system fundamentals. Would a true TOYOTA person put their name on an abomination that cannot even relate TAKT time correctly to readers? This is another typical scenario where some people decided to make money by writing a book about the “TOYOTA IMPACT” in an area that TPS application has not really been widely implemented within even as of 2009 – SUPPLY CHAIN & DISTRIBUTION.
If you want a good vision into TOYOTA on any level, then stick to reading the books by Dr. Jeffrey Liker – the only author that my teams ever saw in TOYOTA facilities and that worked in the operations with us. Other “TOYOTA SOMETHING” authors are just hack job carnival ride operators. If you doubt it, then ask any true TOYOTA associate…
Rating: 1 / 5
February 17th, 2010 at 5:20 am
Having purchased and read many of the TPS books in the past, i’m happy to say this one contained some useful insights i hadn’t come across before. Will it allow your company to fix it’s supply chain….probably not, since it lacks many non-Toyota examples and methods. But just being able to peek in how they’ve been able to align the plant with the customer is refreshing.
Rating: 4 / 5
February 17th, 2010 at 5:21 am
I am an old pro at TPS and have read many books on the topic, have been in this arena for over 20 yrs. This book does not present any new insights, but the authors do a decent job of taking the reader through Toyota’s supply chain practices step-by-step. They use charts and tables very effectively. For example; they follow the process from forecast to S&OP to level scheduling (Heijunka). The reader does not have to be familiar with these functions in order to follow the book. Most experienced practioners will skip many of these pages. This book’s strengths are it’s comprehensiveness and the (fairly) easy to read style.
The authors make a few minor errors. One is around Takt time, which is the rate at which your customers are buying your product divided by your work hours. The authors made the common mistake of using takt time when talking about line cycle time. I have some serious doubt about the section that describes how team members make decisions about sequencing build at the last minute.
All in all, I recommend this book. If you understand this book, will have a good general understand on TPS supply chain.
Rating: 4 / 5