Toyota controls quality, cost by making many parts in house

Toyota's North American factories, which range in age from 10 to 20 years, also perform the sort of large-scale in-house parts making that more modern auto factories no longer do.

But Toyota's factories are the most efficient in North America - parts and all - and Toyota isn't so sure it wants to change.

On one hand, the company sees parts making as a critical piece of its overall quality-control program. Toyota argues that keeping some parts in-house actually makes it more efficient. Outsourcing parts simply to meet the changing industry norm is viewed warily by Toyota executives.

"I don't believe we can outsource our responsibility to the customer," Seizo Okamoto, president of Toyota's truckmaking operations in Princeton, Ind., told Automotive News.

On the other hand, there is evidence of change. Okamoto's Princeton plant used to make its own fuel tanks out of steel. Now it purchases them from a supplier that makes them out of plastic. The same plant, which builds the Tundra pickup, Sequoia SUV and Sienna minivan, also now is using an outside supplier to sort and sequence parts before they arrive at the assembly line.

Okamoto also is overseeing the 2006 launch of a Toyota factory in San Antonio. That plant will rely on a cluster of small supplier operations on Toyota's plant site, adjacent to its assembly shop.

Toyota emerged as the industry's most efficient automaker in this summer's Harbour Report, a closely read annual analysis of automaker operations across the continent. According to the study, Toyota spent 27.90 hours of labor to stamp and assemble its vehicles and powertrains in North America, compared with 29.43 hours at No. 2 Nissan North America Inc., and 34.33 hours for GM, the most efficient of the Big 3.


Source:www.autoweek.com

[Bakemono]

If you are going to post articles like that, you REALLY should name your source. Otherwise, it could be called "plaugerism".
Cap'n