Tqm in Toyota

Client Case Study Toyota invest in 1Tech’s process engineering expertise

Toyota select 1Tech to champion best practice

This case study describes how one of the world’s most innovative and successful companies selected 1Tech to improve and integrate its IT processes and to transfer skills to Toyota’s information systems community. Toyota have developed a collection of processes and standards for use by their Information Systems department known as the Information Systems Methodology (ISM) and, within it, a further set of processes known as the Information Systems Project Methodology (ISPM) to manage both the software development lifecycle and the business processes which govern it. They have also chosen to implement the IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP) for software development and integration projects. At Toyota, all employees have two roles: their own job and quality assurance. On each vehicle production line, a cord, known as the Andon cord, runs along the length of the line. If a line worker notices anything unusual, such as a defect, they pull this cord and the line stops. The team then concentrates all of their effort on correcting the defect before the line starts up again. Toyota invented the concept of Just in Time in 1938 (often described as ‘Just in time, stop the line’). The objective was not simply to reduce inventory, as is often thought, but to avoid building up too much stock with defects which would have to be written off or corrected. Just in Time and this culture of quality evolved into the Toyota Production System and its more generic equivalent, Lean Manufacturing, which is the benchmark for manufacturing organisations across the globe.

Toyota introduced Total Quality Management (TQM) as long ago as 1961 and was the first to introduce ‘Kaizen’ (lit. ‘improvement’) to represent the concept of continuous improvement. These concepts and the associated culture are practiced in every aspect of Toyota’s operations, including information systems....