Lean Six Sigma Safety Management: An Example from Toyota

Lean Six Sigma Safety Management: An Example from Toyota is an article showing how Toyota applies Genchi Genbutsu towards safety efforts.

Kristen Tabar, General Manager, Electronic Systems at the Toyota Technical Center is taking a number of press, analyst, and automotive reporters on a week long behind the scenes tour of Toyota and their efforts toward safer and higher quality vehicles.

In her words,

One of the great guiding traditions here at Toyota is genchi genbutsu, which roughly translates into go and see where work is done in order to gain fuller understanding. Very much in that spirit, Toyota is conducting a safety and quality news media tour of our global headquarters in Japan this week.

This tour will offer a group of about a dozen top-level automotive reporters and analysts a deep dive into a wide variety of Toyota’s safety and quality processes, including our company’s technology, innovation, procedures and plants. Specifically, it was designed to provide an unprecedented level of behind-the-scenes access to the nuts and bolts of how Toyota helps ensure the safety and quality of its vehicles in engineering and development.

I’m particularly looking forward to visiting what many consider to be the most advanced automotive facility in the world, the Higashi-Fuji Technical Center. Here, we will try out a NASA-style driving simulator and witness a vehicle crash test, among other activities. It promises to be pretty big on the wow factor.

Over the next several days, I’ll be posting stories about some of our experiences and the things I am learning. I look forward to sharing them with you.

You can follow her daily blog post on that behind the scenes tour of Toyota.

Kristen Tabar refers to Genchi Genbutsu as a guiding tradition – very appropriate indeed.