Virginia Mason Medical Center Japan Gemba Kaizen Album

The museum was divided into two main sections. One was devoted to the Sakichi Toyoda era of looms and the evolution of the textile technology that formed the origin of Toyota. The second main section was devoted to the development of the Toyota Motor Company driven by Sakichi’s son Kiichiro. The two sections of the museum illustrated the two main pillars of the Toyota production system. The loom side is dedicated to the concept of Jidoka, while the automotive concentrated on the evolution of Just-In-Time and the importance of leveled production. The museum’s strong point was the extensive use of hands-on demonstrations and accompanying videos that brought the exhibits to life.

Jidoka – The earliest implementation and evolution of Jidoka occurred with the development of the automated loom. Sakichi Toyoda started out by automating the shuttle transfer. What started out as a hand transfer of the shuttle turned into a foot controlled operation. This eventually evolved into a fully automated process, with the latest technology using bursts of air for transport. In parallel with the automation of the shuttle transfer came the development of an integral concept of Jidoka called Poka Yoke. This is the concept of the immediate identification of errors combined with process shut down until the problem is solved. This was employed on the looms to detect when a strand in the weave had broken. The strands were routed through a simple weighted ring. If a strand broke, the ring would drop into the path of the weaving machine and stop the weaving machine (see picture below). This simple mechanism enabled a single operator to run several machines with the confidence that the machines were producing quality product and that an alert would occur the moment an error had arisen. This “one operator – multiple machines” concept is a basic fundamental principle of the Toyota Production System that was illustrated at everywhere we visited during the two weeks in Japan.

Leveraging Inventions to Drive Diversification – In the early 1900’s Sakichi Toyoda’s looms had reached world-wide recognition for their ability to produce high quality product in a very efficient manner. Toyoda sold his patents for his machine to a European loom manufacturer and used this capital to develop the first Japanese automobile. Toyota developed their automotive empire on the same quality principles that made the loom successful.

Kanban – In the early 1900’s Sakichi sent his son Kiichiro to the United States to study the Ford Motor company’s assembly line production of the Model T. During the visit he was not only impressed with the Ford plant, but also with the US supermarket and its ability to supply just the right amount of product for the customer at the time it was needed. This formed the basis of the “Just-In Time” production concept. The main idea of JIT is to limit the amount of capital tied up in any product line by producing exactly what is needed, when its needed based on the demand of the customer. To implement this customer driven ordering system the Kanban was developed to signal upstream processes to produce. This upstream direction is known commonly as the “Pull” system because it signals the pull of product from upstream process.