IT drives Toyota's lean improvement

HEADNOTE

Even Toyota, the birthplace of IT-free lean manufacturing, is now investing in shopfloor IT and analytics - and to great effect. Brian Tinham reports

gearing up for a 16% increase in car production from next

month, but with its press shop running at full capacity, Toyota Manufacturing UK at Burnaston, Derbyshire has bowed to the inevitable. It's harnessed IT in this case a new breed of system for shopfloor monitoring and performance analytics aimed at identifying and prioritising opportunities for improvement.

What's interesting about this story is twofold. First, Toyota is seeing the kind of success that demonstrates just how valuable the right systems at the factory level can be. Second, it's being done at a company widely acknowledged as the originator of lean manufacturing - not one renowned for looking to IT for solutions, particularly at the shopfloor level.

From a production management perspective Toyota is all about classic lean visual 'pull' signals and takt time manipulation on its assembly lines for demand management. That pulls material through from its press, weld and paint shops etc, as opposed to MRP-based 'push' scheduling, works orders and the rest.