Basic Principles

Last night I watched “The Toyota Story” on BBC2. It was sad to see the mighty giant in so much difficulty and receiving so much bad publicity. The programme showed how Toyota became the World leader in manufacturing and the five key principles that got it there. For me it was important to be reminded about those principles but also how vital it is to stay focussed on them.

DrivenByQ is based around the same principles and the importance of eliminating waste or “Muda” as the Japanese call it. A lot of people think the principles can only be applied to a manufacturing company with a manufacturing process but to me it can be applied to any company with a continually repeated process.

Take for example the visit that Toyota paid to Ford and the tour around its vast Detroit plant back in the 1950’s. The Japanese witnessed how Ford made cars and how some vehicles had reoccurring faults that appeared in the manufacturing process. At the end of the production line, Ford had an inspection area and any defect vehicles would move to an area for re-work so the individual car could be fixed.

The Japanese saw this and decided that constantly fixing the same fault was ridiculous. They decided it was better to understand the root-cause of the problem and fix that instead. This way the fault could never re-occur. Toyota of course moved to eliminate the re-work area as it was a wasteful process. Why would anyone want to spend time making something wrong and then spend a second amount of time (and money) making it right – today they call it the “right first time” philosophy.

Finding the root cause of a problem is also the heart of a quality system and is intrinsic to a quality process. This story is important because it is a simple but fundamental element in running a modern “lean” business. You can see this directly translated in to our own organization in the way we receive data from our customers. Our booking forms cannot be submitted until all the necessary basic information is present. We receive quality information to begin with so that the rest of the process stands a chance of being correct.

Some of our competitors still use fax machines with no control over the format or completeness of the information they receive. When our competitors have to pick up the phone and call a customer for them to do re-work and acquire the missing data, DrivenByQ is already ahead and ultimately more cost-effective.