LeanBlog Podcast #31 — David Meier on ‘Toyota Talent,’ Standardization, and the San Antonio Plant
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LeanBlog Podcast #31 is a discussion with David Meier, most recently the co-author of the book Toyota Talent, written with Dr. Jeffrey Liker.
In this podcast, we discuss the topics from Toyota Talent, including standardized work and how to use the methodology correctly. We also talk briefly about Toyota's new San Antonio plant. I love David's quote, “Standardization of work doesn't mean that everybody does it exactly the same way.” There will be an upcoming Part 2 of this discussion with David where we talk about upcoming books in the Toyota series, so stay tuned.
If you enjoy this podcast, I hope you'll check out the rest of the series by visiting the LeanBlog podcast main page at http://www.leanpodcast.org/.
Keywords and Main Points, Episode #31
- How does Toyota turn the cliche of “people are our most important asset” into reality?
- How to avoid standardizing for the sake of standardizing — how to decide WHAT to standardize and why
- How did Toyota build upon the Training Within Industry program?
- Why does Toyota look at work in such minute detail, breaking jobs down?
- What are “key points” in a job breakdown sheet? Why is it important to explain why the key points are necessary? Does this tie to “respect for people”?
- How does this process apply to jobs, such as nursing, that aren't repeatable 45 second assembly line cycles?
- Does Toyota invest more time and effort into training new employees than other companies?
- Blog post about Toyota, “frugal” versus “cheap”
- “Standardiziaton of work doesn't mean that everybody does it exactly the same way.”
- Talking about the new Toyota plant in San Antonio
If you have feedback on the podcast, or any questions for me or my guests, you can email me at leanpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave a voicemail by calling the “Lean Line” at (817) 372-5682 or contact me via Skype id “mgraban”. Please give your location and your first name. Any comments (email or voicemail) might be used in follow ups to the podcast. Click here for the main LeanBlog Podcast page with all previous episodes.
Transcript:
Mark Graban: Our guest is David Meier, the co-author of the books The Toyota Way Fieldbook and the more recent Toyota Talent, which is the focus of our conversation today. Thanks for being here.
David Meier: Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.
Why Toyota Talent Was Written
Mark: We're here talking about primarily the new book Toyota Talent, that you co-authored with Jeff Liker. I was wondering if you could give us a brief overview of the book and talk about some of the motivation for writing this one.
David: Sure. Well, after we finished with the fieldbook, we took a look and in my experience with organizations, I think the biggest gap that really is a development of people and specifically training and really the TWI approach and job instructions is a key.
We touched on it briefly in the fieldbook, but we really didn't have enough room there to expand on it thoroughly. I felt like it was something still missing. In that arena, it's a really important process. To me, it's probably the number two most important skill I learned at Toyota following problem solving.
So, kind of crazy, we put a lot of time and effort into the fieldbook and we should've taken a break, but I felt like it was really important. So, I decided to go that route. I kind of had to talk Jeff into it.
How Toyota Invests in Its People
Mark: Yes. The subtitle of the book talks about developing your people the Toyota way. You see a lot of the diagrams and illustrations of what the Toyota production system is. People are usually right in the middle of that diagram.
It's cliché almost for any company, really, to say people are our most important asset. It seems like Toyota really tries to make that a reality. What is it about the Toyota approach to people and training that helps make some of that a reality?
David: Speaking of that cliché, I was at a facility years ago when I first started consulting and they had a great big banner right across the door. People are our most important asset.
At the time, I was a little naïve, I guess, and I thought, that's really great. I'll be able to work with this organization. In the first conversation with the plant manager, the first question was, how many heads can I cut? I ran outside to look at the banner again and make sure I hadn't misread it or something.
I said, I don't understand. If that's really true, if people are your most important asset, why would you want to reduce your most important asset? Wouldn't you want to grow that asset? I think that's the heart of Toyota's belief, is growing the asset, the people asset.
I think Toyota and other companies, I think everyone, I'm really starting to see, every organization, ultimately, the limiting factor, in terms of growth of the organization, is going to be people.
Toyota looks at it both from a practical standpoint that it's necessary to grow people in order for the organization to grow, and then, of course, they put their money where their mouth is, I think. On your blog a while back, there was some discussion about Toyota being frugal or cheap or stingy.
As I went through the Toyota plant the last time, what really struck me was that they don't spend a lot of money on non-essential costs. They basically are frugal and watch the pennies. When it comes to the people side then, there's quite a bit of expenditure, beginning with the selection process.
Then there's a very extensive assimilation where people spend time learning about the company and the culture. They do work hard in developing their physical capabilities before they hit the line. Then when they get to the workplace, the actual workplace, there's a lot of offline skills practice.
They'll learn essential skills. There's intensive training, cross-training. Toyota contributes $16 per person, per quarter to a fund called “Personal Touch” in which the employees then are able to spend that money for different things.
Some of them buy pool tables. There are pool tables and basketball goals and ping pong tables in the plant. I think it's done in a number of ways. The perfect attendance ceremony is huge and expensive, but it's Toyota's way of spending to really grow the people asset.
Mark: It sounds like there's spending in a couple different areas. One is some perks and benefits for the employees. The other category seems like that big investment, that up-front and I'm sure to some extent ongoing investment in selection and training.
It seems like some companies might balk at that, thinking that's just too much money to spend. I want to hire people and throw them in to be productive right away.
David: It is. I think it's a big sacrifice, and I think it's a struggle for some organizations, especially if they're strapped for money at the time, to think about it as a long-term investment. What I do want to point out is, Toyota isn't necessarily best-in-class in this area, in terms of perks and things.
If you look at a company like Google, they've got three cafeterias with all different things in the organization. Certainly Toyota is up there in terms of their commitment to the people and the growth and development of people.
What Toyota Took From Training Within Industry
Mark: The book gives a very, very good, detailed outline of the different phases of the training and development process. You mentioned TWI, the Training Within Industry program. I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how Toyota has used and adopted or built upon that methodology.
David: Primarily, one thing that Toyota picked up from the methodology is this idea of breaking down a job. It really comes through in two different modules, in a job methods process and in a job instruction process. Both of those are based on this four-step methodology.
In both of those, there's a lot of questioning of the detail and breaking down jobs into rather minute detail. I think Toyota really picked up on those. Some of that history, I'm not completely clear on, but Mr. Kato who was the gentleman who trained me in the job instruction methodology back in 1987, he did an interview with Art Smalley.
In there, he talked about how the job methods process was a little bit narrow for Toyota. It didn't include concepts like takt time and flow, which Ohno was really interested in. I think you can definitely see the connection.
When I got ahold of the original materials just about five years ago and I looked at the original TWI materials, there was a lot of, I would say, copying involved where Toyota took those ideas directly. In some cases, they modified. In terms of job instruction, they were really true to the original method.
When I read the original book, I felt like I was back in my training. Kato followed that methodology pretty strictly. There were a few modifications, and I think that material is from 1940s, so a little bit dated in some cases.
Some terminologies and things were updated, but basically the core methodology, the four steps method, is still used in Toyota today for training purposes.
Why Toyota Goes Into Such Fine Detail
Mark: When you're talking about breaking down a job, I think when we've talked before outside the podcast, I remember a comment you made about the level of detail that Toyota goes through, really looking at minute detail.
I was wondering if you could share some stories about that, why it can be valuable to really look at such a fine level of detail.
David: I think that idea of breaking the job down originated with the TWI methodologies, especially in job methods. There's this four-step method to really question every detail, to look at it. I think Toyota took that to heart and probably realized that within the detail is the secret of doing a job effectively.
Also at that detailed level, being able to communicate that and transfer that understanding to other people, teach other people. When I'd look at other companies and I'd try to think about it, I'd talk to the leadership there about their knowledge of the job.
The knowledge is fairly superficial. They have a broad knowledge. This is basically what happens, but in terms of asking specific questions, what happens if you do it this way, for example, usually there's not that depth of understanding.
We guestimated in the book that Toyota goes into detail five times more than most other companies, or maybe ten times more. It is, it's very detailed, and I told a group recently, the examples in there from bumper molding, a friend of mine from Toyota who also worked in bumper molding and read that said, I bet you pulled those sheets from your archives.
I said, no, I actually pulled those from my memory, and the detail that I was able to recall after 14 years, it's 14 years since I worked in that area, indicates how deeply we understood the work, the kind of detail we went into.
In the book, we talked about breaking it into the categories of critical or important or not so important. In terms of the critical steps of the job, I can probably remember those for every work area that I was responsible for at Toyota.
Mark: You talk about the critical steps. One thing I really like about the TWI and the job breakdown sheet method is the focus on the key points and going that extra step further of explaining why steps are important. It seemed like that's a very common theme in the Toyota approach.
I assume it ties into the idea of respect for people, that you're taking that extra effort not just because I said so as the boss or a co-worker, but because there's some legitimate reason behind it.
David: I think that was one point where Toyota modified the job instruction method. The original material didn't really talk about presenting the reason so much. What I found personally, there's several benefits to it.
One is that it's a reality check as you're breaking down the job to find out, is there really a valid reason that we do it this way, or am I just trying to promote my personal methodology? Everybody has a favorite way.
What people would say sometimes, they'd break down a job and they'd identify a key point. They'd say, the reason is for safety. Specifically, what is it that we're trying to prevent? Are we trying to prevent some specific injury?
The second piece is it forces you at that point to really question the validity of the key point and the key to the process is to minimize those, to really just look at the most relevant pieces of information.
When you're trying to teach somebody something, literally you could elaborate on all kinds of things. Guys ask me all the time with standardized work, they say, do we have to talk about which hand the screwdriver's in, or which angle?
It depends. It depends on the relevance of that. Is it necessary to have a screwdriver in one hand? Does it benefit productivity? Is it related to the flow of the workplace? We have to consider the key points and have, really, a lot of evaluation on them.
Then the other piece is just what you said, for people to understand that there is a valid reason that we do things, that we're not just trying to be dictatorial. I would often take the team members up to the assembly department and show them the person who's putting our parts on the vehicle and show them how what we did related to what they do, so that they could have a better understanding of that.
I think then people are less likely to try to come up with a variant method. It helps to ingrain it. They don't forget it, so I think it's a real important part of the process.
Deciding What to Standardize
Mark: That's one other thing that really stood out to me from the book, this notion of figuring out what to standardize. With any of the lean tools, it's tempting to say, here's this principle that we've heard is good, this idea of standardizing how things are done and to almost mindlessly take that to an extreme.
Standardizing is good, so we're on a standardizing kick, the same way a company might be on a 5S kick. I've seen too many environments where that notion of standardizing causes heartburn. I think a lot of it may come back to, people question, you're trying to standardize things that don't matter.
It's more about you asserting your authority than it is about taking care of the customer and ensuring safety or a quality product.
David: I think this whole idea of standardized work and standardizing is one of the most difficult and challenging. Certainly in the fieldbook, it was the most difficult chapter to write, because it's broad, for one thing, and because there's so much misunderstanding, for another.
I really wanted to try to clear up some of those misconceptions. The first thing to me is, I see a lot of folks going, they've got their lean journey, step-by-step. Step 10 says implement standardized work, so they go out and start implementing “standardized work.”
What that usually means is write the jobs down, put it on a sheet, and post it in the work area. That's not it at all. That might be the final manifestation. If you go into Toyota, you might see that, but there's a whole lot up front prior to that.
To me, first of all, standardization isn't a line item on your lean journey. It becomes necessary at some point in your process when you start to realize, hey, we're getting into a certain issue, we're finding out about a particular quality problem or some other problem, and at the root of it, we don't have a defined method. So let's define the method. Really it's part of the problem-solving process.
Standardization is an answer to a problem. If I don't have a specific problem, or I don't know that I have a need to begin with…I could go out and standardize a million things. Literally, you could standardize till the end of time and that would be all you would do. So you have to be very selective and make sure that this applies to a need.
The second key piece, again, is that breakdown that we talked about in the talent book where it says, “What are the critical elements of the work?” I often ask groups of managers, “How much of your work is critical?” Some folks say 100 percent. No way. It's just not possible that 100 percent is critical. You really have to begin and kind of slice across there and take a portion and say, “Where do we have the greatest need? Where do we have issues in our process that we need to dig into?” Then we can use this standardized work tool to help us to resolve that.
I believe it's a selective process. At some point, like in Toyota's development, 60 years or so into this process, they've spread it across all the jobs and so forth. But if you're just starting out, you have to begin with a selection process, I think.
Mark: Make sure you're not standardizing the deck chairs on the Titanic while your business is falling apart.
David: Exactly. To me, I think it requires an incredible amount of time, because there's typically interaction between the folks who are doing the work every day. Most organizations I deal with there's some discrepancies already between how people do the work. Need to clarify, are the discrepancies acceptable, because sometimes they are. Standardization of work doesn't mean everybody does it exactly the same.
Mark: I guess there's a reason it's not called “identical work,” right?
David: Exactly! But when I ask the question, “What does standardized mean?” usually people say they think it means “the same” – the same in terms of the critical part, or the very important parts of the work. I give a breakdown in the talent book, in terms of the trimming of a bumper. There were some parts of the task that had very little margin of error. They were very specific in the way they had to be done. So for those particular tasks, we couldn't allow any deviation from the methodology.
In other cases, the work wasn't quite as defined. Spray mold release in the mold. Your spray pattern is probably not going to be identical to somebody else's, but we need to get it close enough that we still get a good result.
Then there were some activities that were of low importance, they had low impact overall on quality, safety, productivity. In those cases it wasn't that big a deal as long as you can still meet the requirements. But understanding that helps a lot in understanding how to approach the work and how to think about breaking it down.
Mark: One example I've always thought of when you're talking about the context of what to standardize comes back to the many years I was in marching bands. The standard work and the training involved in a marching band oftentimes comes to a level of detail I would never ask people to specify in regular work.
Marching band, they teach you, always take your first step with your left foot, and each of your steps have to be 22 and a half inches long. It's very precise specifications there. But from a visual standpoint, those things end up being very important so that everybody is moving in unison, and people are staying in straight lines and hitting yard lines at the same time.
But for people doing material handling, or working within a hospital, it wouldn't make any difference if they took their first step with the left or the right foot, I would assume.
David: I think that's a good analogy. I think if you look in sports, particularly in Olympic events, swimming, you have body position, exact position of the hands. All of those things can make the difference of a hundredth of a second, which can mean the difference between a gold and a silver. With a marching band, having everyone in unison is a critical part of the overall presentation.
I think, you used the word precise, I think the level of precision that's necessary, I think in a lot of cases, people are undervaluing that, or not understanding it completely. There's an assumption, oh, that's not really that critical. But then you see the end result in a high level of defects, or low productivity, that sort of thing.
I think there's more acceptance overall outside of Toyota for the fact that things don't always work. At Toyota, we realize that within those details, the precision that's necessary for the consistent outcome is there. We have to dig into those so that we get a consistent outcome.
Breaking Down Non-Repetitive Jobs Like Nursing
Mark: One other thing that I thought was worth highlighting from the book is the idea that job breakdown, or the standard work process, is something that doesn't just apply to, say, highly repetitive, 40-second assembly line cycles. You shared some examples. I was wondering if you could talk about the idea of doing job breakdown and standard work for jobs that are maybe less routine.
David: Sure. That's a challenge. But I learned to apply this method at Toyota, and a lot of the jobs that we had in plastics weren't necessarily the routine, 55-second takt time activities. Yet, we were breaking those down and training people. We wanted to include some examples from healthcare, from outside of standard manufacturing.
Even within manufacturing, I believe there are just a number of jobs – you mentioned material handling, for example – a number of jobs that aren't on that tight, cyclical, repetitive basis. We take a look at the work. I still realize, though, that for some of the tasks, there may be some repetition to that. So we kind of start breaking it down, and we put into categories of core tasks.
The art of breaking down a job is just trying to categorize and group the different elements. You're trying to get down to what we call a teachable bit. A portion of the work that can be taught to someone in a matter of about 15 minutes worth of training. About 15 minutes worth of the students repeating back and demonstrating back. So about a 30-minute interval for training is considered to be about average. Of course, there's more practice required after that.
So, we look at a job like a nurse. Consider that a nurse is bouncing all over the place. They go here and there. Of course, from their perspective, they say, “How am I supposed to break my job down? It's never the same.” But in reality, there's a lot of sameness within the job, it just doesn't repeat on any kind of cycle. The cycle is variable.
But if you get beyond that, if you get beyond the sequence of the work steps and just think about the individual activities that are done, then you can really get down to that level and break it down.
Mark: So, you may have, let's say as a nurse, a very unpredictable day, as far as the exact sequence and timing, but you have certain activities that come up very frequently. You could do a job breakdown for specific patient interactions or specific functions that you do during the day.
Sounds like what you're saying is, not trying to train somebody on the complete end-to-end job, but to pick small chunks or individual tasks. The fear would be that you overwhelm somebody by trying to stuff too much knowledge into their heads all at once?
David: What typically happens, I've seen this so many times. You mentioned teaching the complete task. So if I'm trying to train a nurse, for example, and the typical method is here, go shadow Dave, you're going to be with Dave for a couple of days, or weeks, or whatever. Here I am, and I'm trying to think about teaching you in some sequential manner, and of course, the work isn't sequential at all.
I start off and I say, “OK, Mark, the first thing you have to do is this.” I start to show you, and we're about a third of the way into that and all of a sudden something else pops up. OK, hold on a second, we got to run over here. I go over there and change gears, and say “Mark, when you're doing this, here's what you have to do.” We get halfway into that and all of a sudden something else pops up and we go running off in another direction.
Study after studies indicate what our limits are in terms of learning capabilities and how many of those chunks we can absorb at any given time. The student becomes quickly confused, first of all because the training has gone off on four or five different tracks. And overwhelmed, and don't get that opportunity then to also practice and repeat back what was learned, and some of those important things.
I've seen a lot of folks try to do that with a non-cyclical job. It's more challenging, of course, because of the nature of the work.
The first thing is, when training, we have to separate ourselves from the real work at the time we're training. Because when I'm training someone, for example, training at Toyota, if I'm training on the line, I can't train you fully at line speed to begin with. If I'm teaching a nurse, I don't want to be in the middle of teaching you how to draw blood, then we have to backtrack and go somewhere else.
The teaching event is a very intentional sort of event and you kind of have to block off time and separate yourself from the real work during that event. Sometimes that's challenging. That's a big challenge. I'm not saying that that happens that way every time, but that would certainly be preferable.
Mark: I saw a blog post just a couple of days ago, the Daily Kaizen blog from the folks at the Group Health Cooperative Hospital in Seattle that I had here on the podcast. They went and toured NUMMI in California. One of the things they were impressed with and wrote about was the offline simulated car training area.
They made a comment about how nice it would be to have something similar to that in healthcare to coach and train, for example, an OR team working together, is something they came away with. I don't think it's happening. It's an opportunity they saw.
David: I think just to get back to the original question of the importance of that virtual nature. There's too much risk involved with putting a new hire directly on the line. There's too much risk involved in shutting down the line. There's too much risk involved in terms of damaging the product or even potential injury.
The offline training is really a way to minimize that risk. It's not Toyota looks at it and says, “Oh, let's do it this way because there's some training advantage.” I think it's more to get the basic skills mastered before you risk, for example, somebody slipping with a screw gun and scratching a vehicle, which is possibly a typical error.
The line speed is there as an issue. I've trained a lot of people on the line, at rate. When you do that, you have to have the regular operator there to do 45 seconds of the 55 seconds work, and then you teach the person how to do 10 seconds worth of work.
Once they master the 10 seconds, you teach them another 10 seconds, and then another 10 seconds, and another 10 seconds. It's a more lengthy process to teach someone on the line. I can actually accelerate the process by doing it offline.
Training for the San Antonio Plant Ramp-Up
Mark: We're starting to get a little bit short on time here, David. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the new Toyota plant in San Antonio, with the ramp up and training of new employees and developing of a new process, how some of the methodologies from Toyota talent are being applied down there.
David: One thing I think in the San Antonio plant, of course, they're producing a new product for Toyota, the full-sized pickup truck. I'm imagining that there's a lot of learning from the ground up in terms of the job and trying to do processes that Toyota hasn't done in most of the other facilities.
The product has been produced in Japan or somewhere so they've got some prior history. I'm sure that they're doing a lot of breaking down of the work and trying to understand the specifics there. I'm sure that they're using some of the principles, in terms of training offline or some of the newer things that they're doing in the global production center that we talked about in the book.
The other thing that's interesting is that there aren't a lot of local automotive suppliers in that region. They put the plant in Texas because it's the heart of truck buying country. But there aren't a lot of suppliers there. Toyota has a different approach where they've put 21 of the suppliers onsite, right on the Toyota property. Several of those are within Toyota's building.
Those suppliers are very closely linked to the line. It's creating some challenges. They receive the message to produce the vehicle about 90 minutes before the actual build. They're producing in sequence. Many of the suppliers are getting the products to send to the line.
In both of those cases, it requires them to have perfect quality, essentially quality has to be great. The people have to be well trained. They have to have the foundation of the standardized work and training in place. One of the plant managers there said that this type connection forces them to have to be better than anyone else.
I think if you look at the situation, most people would say, “Well, that's kind of crazy, to be that tightly connected with not much protection.” I think that's precisely the idea that Toyota has there, is that it raises the urgency level and makes it critical.
Mark: A different example of lowering the water to force them to get better at that.
David: Right.
Mark: I'm sure problems do occur, but they have a way of correcting that, and making sure the problem maybe doesn't happen again.
David: Yeah, definitely, there are problems that occur. It's challenging. I think it's certainly a risky proposition. Toyota has worked to create systems to try to help alleviate some of those issues. It does. It forces everyone there to really have to be on their game and to perform at a high level. That's basically the idea. There are some short-term risks of the line stopping or things, yes.
I think if you see anything in the news, you can see that they are experiencing some difficulties in the plant and trying to get things lined out.
Mark: I'm sure they're working on it. That's the key of pushing towards perfection, always working on it.
David: That's right.
Mark: Once again we want to thank you for joining us here on the podcast. As I mentioned on the blog, I wrote a separate review. I've really enjoyed Toyota Talent. There's definitely a lot of good conceptual, interesting material in there. There's also a lot that's very practical and applicable.
David, I want to thank you again for sharing your insights and being here with us.
David: Thank you, Mark. I appreciate your efforts there on the blog. Keep up the good work. Keep us posted on your upcoming work.
