What is Toyota Kata?
“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."
- W. Edwards Deming
American engineer, statistician, and management consultant.
Many organizational management techniques and theories have come about over the last century in the quest to improve the processes involved when creating products and goods. Introduced in the early 1900s, The Scientific Theory of Management created by Fredrick Taylor was the first to postulate the idea that employees had the capacity to be taught processes required for a work assignment. Before this, the popular thinking was to fit a person to the job, with the individual having all prerequisite skills acquired before getting the assignment. Training was virtually non-existent for personnel working for a company. The goal in this management theory was to get the worker as efficient as a machine in performing their work assignments. While flawed, the Scientific theory established a foundation for management theories to develop (Taylor’s Motivation Theory-Scientific Management 2018, May). Additional thought was given to the ideas related to management and production flow that led to more approaches formulating as the 20th century progressed. In the 1930s, these efforts continued in Japan, improving on the management concepts that culminated in the creation of what is known today as Lean Management.
Lean Management
Lean Management is an approach to handle global competition, saturated markets and differentiated customer requests. The origins are from the book “The Machine That Changed the World” by Womack, Jones and Roos 1991. This book traced the performance superiority of Toyota compared to other manufacturers. Lean Management (LM) focuses on the customer’s need to which corporate activities are aligned – values creating activities from a customer’s perspective enables two major opportunities: (1) non-value adding activities (waste) can be minimized, giving results in cost reduction. (2) By producing according to customer need, customer satisfaction is achieved beyond expectation which produces a result in sale increases.
Toyota follows a different approach with employees assigned to the shop floor are entrusted with a task of process improvement and are given consistent and target-oriented development of new standards in the process of value creating. This also accomplishes the nurturing of leadership skills for empowering employees and methods to analyze the processes (Kersten, 2015).
Toyota Principals’ for Lean Management Implementation
Toyota Lean Management Implementation, also referred to as the 4P Model, advances the long-term vision for Toyota, that is the Just-in-Time process, also has a guide for process development following certain principles, i.e. leveraging customer needs and creating flow, also collaboration between employee and supervisor (Kersten, 2015).
Toyota Business Practices
Toyota designed the process for meeting challenges in an 8-step plan that includes:
1. Define the problem in relation to the ideal state. (Plan)
2. Capture the current state of the identified problem. (Plan)
3. Identify the root cause. (Plan)
4. Set an improvement target to strive for. (Plan)
5. Select a suitable approach. (Plan)
6. Experiment to explore possible solutions. (Do)
7. Control the results to ensure viability of possible solution. (Check)
8. Adapt and standardize and spread the solution. (Act)
By applying this procedure as a routine approach to problems, the process of internalization is achieved (Rother, 2015). Toyota does this by using the procedure at the shop floor under guidance from a coach. This approach supports the following key assumptions of learning: (1) People learn by taking small steps through a long-term period. (2) Knowledge should be transferred by a coach. (3) The process should be undertaken as on-the-job learning. (4) The small learning steps should be integrated into a bigger picture to ensure standardization (Rother, 2010).
This 8-step process of problem solving and key assumptions is called Toyota Kata, referring to the martial arts procedure of continuously repeating motion sequences until they become automatic routines (Rother, 2010).
Results of Toyota Kata Study
Researchers concluded that Lean Management implementation efforts can be successfully achieved in the Western Industries. The key to this required careful consideration and influencing the behavioral aspects to bring the workforce up to speed on how Toyota Kata improves production and efficiency. Furthermore, when examining implementation costs, the benefits outweighed initial start-up expenses (Kersten, 2015).
Rigid vs Flexibility
Toyota Kata has the advantage of being a rigid and flexible method at the same time. This is based on the 3 rules of design, as well as the 1 rule of improvement within the system. This allows for and even encourages dynamic growth and improvement. To accomplish this, new standards must be created to test new procedures (Kersten, 2015). This allows failure to be overcome with reworks and improvements to the process. Toyota’s output should be free of defect, created to meet specific criteria, supplied immediately on demand without wasting resources while being created in a safe environment. Anything short of this goal (Rigid) leaves room for improvement. (Flexibility) These contradict each other because flexibility is the opposite of rigidity; however, they support each other by offering rigid rules to maintain consistency and flexibility for improvement (Rother, 2010).
This management system creates a culture in the company whereas employees are empowered to innovate creative solutions for challenges faced in the market. Problem solving skills combined with a continuous process improvement mindset allows each employee not only to feel valued, but also as an integral contributor to the company’s success. This culture of steady improvement through learning and teamwork promotes continuous growth (Rother, 2015).
Tsunami
The Tsunami of 2011 that struck Japan created hardships for a multitude of companies operating in Japan, especially for supply chains disrupted by the disaster. This tested Toyota’s Just-in-Time ethos for supplies and products. By doing this, they prepared the company for the next crisis and rolled out several crisis containment measures. With the lessons learned from 2011, Toyota retrieved critical molds from the earthquake-stricken supplier factories and ordered substitute parts from China during the 2016 earthquake. Some factories were off-line for as little as 6 hours. (Greimel, 2016).
Proof of Toyota Kata System
The empirical advantage enjoyed by Toyota by using the Kata system is on display when one reflects on the company’s track record. Toyota is the 10th largest company in the world by revenue with a multi-national automotive manufacturer headquarters located in Toyota, Aichi Japan. They are second in size opposite Volkswagen, yet are still the only automotive producer to consistently produce over 10 million vehicles per year since 2012 (Kersten, 2015).
Summary
Toyota has developed a management system that many other companies continue to emulate in the hopes that they can repeat the levels of success Toyota has achieved. Lean management and its applications to other industries remains an option for an organization to replicate to improve their processes and production levels. However, to fully gain by using this system, a business must fully embrace the concepts and ways of thinking required or it will fail. The entire formula must be completely incorporated in an organization to realize the desired benefit.
References
Greimel, H. (2016, April 25). How Toyota applied the lessons of 2011 quake. Retrieved from https://www.autonews.com/article/20160425/OEM/304259956/how-toyota-applied-the-lessons-of-2011-quake
Kersten, W. (2015, August). Toyota Kata: Empowering Employees for Target-Oriented Improvement – A Best Practice Approach. Retrieved from https://ideas.repec.org/h/zbw/hiclch/209255.html
Rother, M. (2010). Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness, and Superior Results. New York, NY. McGraw-Hill
Taylor’s Motivation Theory-Scientific Management. (2018, May). Retrieved from https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2018/05/taylors-scientific-management/