Visit to Toyota
My first day in Nagoya was spend quite relaxed. I tried to recover from the trip and also from the training the day before. I met up with Craig and Kenji, who were going to join me to Toyota.
Today we went to the Toyota factory. After about an hour trip from the Nagoya central station we arrived in Toyota City. Toyota city is a city that was renamed after Toyota in 1959 because Toyota was building all their factories in the city or neighbourhood. About half the people who work in Toyota in Japan, work in Toyota city.
We first arrived in one of the Toyota Museums. This is opposite to the Toyota world head-office. We walked around and saw all the neat new things Toyota is planning and doing, like the i-Unit which is a small one-person vehicle. The trompet playing robot. The extremely light cars. The cars that automatically prevent collisions, etc. Also a lot of information about the Toyota production system. After this visit, we joined the Toyota factory tour which took about 2 hours. The first stop was the assembly shop, which they put the cars together. It was incredibly impressive to see the flow in the factory. Everything happens at a rhythm, things are always moving everywhere. The andon board was highly visible and went on yellow several times. One time I found the station and saw some discussion about something that was wrong with the car. People looked concerned, though they didn't stop the line yet. It was amazing to see all the things working in a smooth flow and coordinated.
The second part was the welding shop. Here they reached a level of 93% automation and all the welding was done using robots. It was the most interesting sight to see all the robots at the same time "attack" the vehicle and start welding at the different places. There were andon lights, but they never went of when we were in the welding shop. That was the end of the factory tour already, I could have stayed longer to see all the activity and movement.
After the factory tour, we met with some people from Toyota who were willing to answer some questions we had, especially related to the product development. We learned a lot about the product development and got some answers, though the person wasn't directly involved and thus the answers were only on the surface. Still it was a nice conversation.
We went back to Nagoya to meet with an ex-Toyota manager who worked there for 35 years. We had some Japanese food and Sake and he told stories about his time in Toyota, what he had done and things related to the TPS. He was an extremely nice guy and it was a very nice meeting. We all learned a lot of the tour and the talks. Tomorrow we'll visit the Toyota museum and then it's time to get back home again.
