Toyota discloses unprecedented details of F1 development

This is a fundamental principle of TPS. It is far better to stop production and tackle problems rather than allow faults to be picked up later by quality control, when it may be too late to pinpoint the source and even more parts will have been produced with the same concern.

With each stoppage a meeting was called to discuss solutions. It took a while for everyone concerned to get used to this method, as there was a natural reluctance for individual operators to call time consuming halts. However, they soon learned to undertake increased responsibility for their areas.

The TPS principle of eliminating muda, or waste, can be applied to time as much as materials, and it was clear that things could be done much faster.

“We looked at waste of time regarding the movement of parts. We took the layout of the department, and followed the path with a pen. Each piece was being passed from one station to another, and this is where we lost the time. If you just added up the machining time, it was a week. This showed us that many weeks were just wasted, and the part was just lying around.”

This inefficiency was to some degree a result of Toyota Motorsport’s dramatic expansion over previous years. During the rapid transition from rallying through the Le Mans programme to Formula 1, the whole Cologne operation had to grow and adapt, including the production side. There was no real opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper and plan things in the most efficient and logical manner.

“We had expanded the existing building and whenever we needed a little bit of space we moved a machine in there without thinking if it made sense. Thus we had to move parts over the corridor, and we lost a lot of time. So we changed the layout – we moved some machines so the operator now only had to go one or two metres. He didn’t have to transfer the part over the corridor to a different area, and maybe leave it laying there with no one looking after it.” One of the biggest problems was that the department had operated without sufficient consideration to where the end product was going.

“We had more than 90 cylinder heads in production, there were parts everywhere, and we had no real idea where our parts were. At the time our philosophy was to run the machines for 24 hours, producing cylinder head after cylinder head. But in the end if you looked at the number of races and tests, you could only use a certain amount. This is when we decided to produce just in time – when you need one, you produce a new one. It doesn’t make sense to produce more than the engines you can build.”

Producing only what is needed when it is needed is one of the main pillars of TPS, and the principle has been widely adopted across industry in recent decades. To make it work properly requires the use of kanban, in effect an ordering system that ensures that cylinder heads are now only put into production when they are required, rather than just to keep the machines busy.

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