Sustaining lean six sigma at Toyota

Quality is an indispensable dimension that every organization must adhere to. Be it a product or service, all an end customer expects from a provider is quality. The following section describes how well the two famous organizations, Toyota has managed to stand as leaders in rendering quality  products and services respectively by adopting quality policies and practices at each and every level of the organization.

In 1937, Kiichiro Toyoda founded Toyota motors by gaining the blessings of his father Sakichi Toyoda, who was world famous for his role in the automatic loom development. Toyota has been open in sharing remarkably the competitive advantage with the remaining world. Toyota is a pioneer in manufacturing quality products and services for year and holds an unbeatable position till date.

Lean Six Sigma at Toyota is an ongoing process. As the company continues to grow more people are trained and more projects are running concurrently (Ohno, 1998; Evans J R and Lindsay W M, 2007). This entire activity means that there is a greater return on investment and as the company prospers financially the wealthy is shared across the organization and employee satisfaction and personal growth continues. Lean Six Sigma implementation requires regular audits and reviews of all the elements including deployment process, infrastructure and strategy of the Lean Six Sigma program. There are three key components in sustaining the implementation. They are leadership support, utilizing the right resources and defining business objectives to measure success.

To conclude active involvement and commitment from Senior Executives, incentives, reward, recognition, celebration, supplier involvement and management accountability for quality improvement can enable Toyota sustain Lean Six Sigma.

References

• Evans J R and Lindsay W M (2007), Managing for Quality and performance excellence, South Western College Publications, 7th edition England
• Ohno T (1998), The Toyota Production System: Beyond Large scale Production, Productivity Press, Portland