Toyota sweats U.S. labor costs Another article about the report that was taken from a Toyota computer, this time focused on Toyota’s concerns about rising labor costs. You might call this healthy level of desire for continuous improvement, always striving…
I saw this at a hospital lab last year, a great example of true error proofing vs. just putting up warning signs. “Cautions” and “Warnings” are lazy engineering, in general, with product design. Signs are not good problem-solving in any…
Inside Bay Area – IBA – Alameda Times-Star – Home Here’s a pretty glowing article about how NUMMI, the Toyota/GM joint venture plant in Fremont CA, focuses on employee health and safety. When I visited NUMMI last year, one of…
Inside Bay Area – IBA – Tri-Valley Herald – Local News Here’s an article about the Toyota-GM joint venture plant known as NUMMI. I had a chance to visit NUMMI late last year and I published some of my “tour…
Society of Manufacturing Engineers Here’s a good overview of the Toyota/GM “Joint Venture” plant, NUMMI. I put “JV” in quotes because, sure there is joint ownership, but it’s not really jointly managed. A manager at NUMMI says: Most people are…
Here is the sixth, and probably final, installment of my tales from the NUMMI tour. You can revisit them by starting with Tale #1 and continuing on from there. One more important reminder from the NUMMI visit reinforced something I’d…
NUMMI Tour Tale #4: The Pull Gift Shop While the NUMMI plant would score very highly on almost any measure of visual management, you could still see on a tour that it wasn’t 100% perfect in its 5S compliance. In…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator?NUMMI Tour Tale #2: The Power of Reynolds WrapNUMMI Tour Tale #3: The Power of Why Back to stories about my tour of the Toyota/GM plant in Fremont CA. The NUMMI lobby has…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator?NUMMI Tour Tale #2: The Power of Reynolds Wrap I think, by now, that Toyota is pretty famous for its “5 Whys” approach for root cause problem solving. Asking why five times, in…
NUMMI Tour Tale #1: Why Fix the Escalator? The NUMMI tour guide told an interesting kaizen story as we went past the body weld area. Car bodies are held and transported on metal carrier racks that recirculate through the welding…
I really enjoyed my tour of the NUMMI plant last Friday. I’ll post my summary thoughts and impressions from the tour, but I wanted to post a few of the more interesting stories first. In a back part of the…
Milpitas Post – Local I saw the plant on Friday, it was pretty cool. Some excerpts from my visit notes are below, I should be posting the whole thing soon: Before entering the Gemba, you walk past a “Simulated Work…
