ТОЙОТА ФОРУМ БЪЛГАРИЯ

Twenty years ago, Japanese car companies solved their quality control problem using a technique called Kanban. Instead of following the American technique of having plenty of spare parts on the assembly line (workers were told to just discard a screw if it didn’t fit right in), the Japanese adopted a fundamentally different strategy. They kept only one necessary part at a time on the assembly line. If the part wasn’t perfect, the entire assembly line stopped until a new part arrived.

The Americans said that this was insane. Everyone knew that keeping the assembly line moving was the only way to make a car efficiently. If a finished car wasn’t good enough, then you fixed it after it was assembled.

What Toyota and Honda understood was that the act of stopping the assembly line would send a powerful signal to every worker and to every supplier. Sure enough, the line didn’t have to stop very often. Every part improved in quality, because no one wanted to be responsible for shutting the operation down. As a result, better parts improved every car as well. With Kanban, very few cars left the assembly line in need of later reworking. It turned out to be cheaper and faster to build cars right the first time than it was to fix them later.