Jim Holder
INSIDE INFORMATION
Toyoda believes readiness is the key to success
KAIZEN: A SINGLE word of Japanese that sets Toyota apart. It means ‘continuous improvement’, and it came back to mind late last month when Toyota became the first car maker to declare it was back to full production capacity, having overcome the chip crisis’s challenges.
Toyota’s primacy today owes everything to tragedy, the 2011 earthquake that triggered a tsunami and subsequent meltdown of the nuclear powerplant in Fukushima having laid bare the fragility of its supply chain. It took production six months to recover, and kaizen demanded lessons be learned; 500 priority items, semiconductor chips among them, were found as risks.