Originally Posted by jruhi4

Obsession rules at Lexus flagship plant
Everyone sweats the details in Japanese factory
by James B. Treece - Automotive News

TAHARA, Japan - A visit to the Toyota Motor Corp. plant that builds the flagship LS 600h L and its engine is a lesson in obsession.

Toyota trains and retrains its Lexus workers. It turns cleanliness into a fetish. It measures everything. And then it minutely inspects every finished car.

Why such attention to detail?
Toyota believes it is in an ever-escalating race for perfection.

"The Corolla quality level is almost the same as the first-generation LS," says Shoji Ikawa. He is chief production engineering officer and a senior managing director at Toyota. "It was time for us to raise the bar again."

To build finger strength, workers twist their fingers in the fat plastic webbing of what looks like tennis-racket heads.

They arrange a series of small tins of lip-glosslike containers in order of shading to develop an eye for tints and color.

They learn by feel how to pick up, say, five bolts at a time - not six. They learn to listen for the sound of a bolt tightened with the perfect amount of torque.

"Of course, the five senses are important for assembly," says one of the trainers. Toyota showed journalists the plant near Toyota City in a recent media event.

Training and retraining
Before workers are allowed on the line, they undergo extensive training. Lectures and computer-based lessons combine with dexterity and physical training. The training center has 10 trainers and 40 assistant trainers.

The training never ends.

Under a skills certification system, workers take increasingly difficult tests to prove their skill levels.

There are 26,000 operations at the plant that can be certified as done properly. Currently, the plant's workers hold 1,800 Level 3 certificates. Workers have earned an additional 600 of the more difficult Level 2 certificates and 300 elite Level 1 certificates.

Each certificate is valid for only four months. After that, the worker must be retested.

To show the testing methods, Toyota has one worker act out the role of a candidate for certification. His "chief leader" stands behind him, while two testers watch his every move and listen to his litany on proper assembly.

"One grommet will be taken out by my left hand. With the fingers of my left hand, I will place the grommet in location, and with my right thumb I will press it into place," he intones loudly, his body at attention. Matching the actions to his spiel, he spins into motion.

He concludes his demonstration: "By not observing these rules, there might be leakage of water." The judges deem his words, body movements and placement of the grommet acceptable.

Air showers
Doing the job right isn't enough. Workers also must be clean enough to be allowed onto the line.

A sign hanging near a workers' rest area illustrates proper dress for male and female workers. Women are discouraged from wearing too much makeup. Both men and women must wear restaurantlike hairnets in the engine-assembly plant.

To enter the engine plant, workers must go through an air shower akin to that outside semiconductor clean rooms. Toyota says it is the only engine plant in the world that insists on an air shower.

To be sure, other plants also have cleanliness rules.

At Renault SA's assembly plant in Douai, France, visitors have to place clean booties over their shoes before touring the plant. Toyota did not require that of its Tahara visitors.

Even so, it is clear that Tahara frets about contamination from outside impurities. Line workers must wear clean shoes. Suppliers cover every tube opening or other spot where dirt might collect while the part is in transit. Workers wipe the floor around their work areas with damp cloths at the end of every day.

Toyota uses what it calls data-based manufacturing to ensure the LS 600h's top-of-the-line status.

For example, it determined that the previous-generation LS would drift by 50 centimeters from a straight line over 100 meters. Unacceptable, it decided.

So for the redesigned LS, it identified each offending part and recalibrated how to make it more precise.

One step: Weld many of the body parts at the same time to improve the accuracy of weld positioning. Then measure the positioning of each part as it goes in the car, well before it's time to measure the accuracy of the car's overall alignment.

Result: The LS 600h only diverges 25 centimeters from center over 100 meters.

Test every car
One way Toyota checks that is to test-drive every car that comes off the line. At 56 mph, the white-gloved test driver takes his hands off the wheel to see that the car tracks straight. He listens for any sound that shouldn't be there. He puts the car through hard braking and hard acceleration.

Inspections combine the trained, skilled eyes of veterans and the latest computerized measuring methods.

Tahara has 200 inspectors looking for scratches on the car's body. That's twice as many as in a standard Toyota plant. They check 4,000 points on the car. That's 1½ times as many points as Toyota plants check.


One of the 200 body-panel inspectors at the Tahara plant uses touch and sight to check
for blemishes.

The inspectors bend and twist their bodies like a class of yoga students as they pore over the car. For all their skill, though, Toyota doesn't believe they can catch all possible imperfections. So the automaker has added robotic cameras.

The robot moves down the line with the car under glaring bright lights. It takes between 1,200 and 1,300 shots of each car from various angles. A computer analyzes the photos to detect scratches that would be almost invisible to the human eye. If it finds any, it informs the inspectors.

Other cameras and hand-held digital calipers measure gaps between body panels and interior parts.


At the end of the line, a plant inspector uses a digital caliper to measure the gap between
the hood and the front quarter panel on a Lexus LS 600h.

Paint is inspected under different shades of lighting because imperfections in a silver bumper don't show up as well under the lighting used to detect blemishes in black paint.

Other tests are too secret to share.

"We can't disclose our milliwave inspection of cruise control," a tour guide says with a tone of regret.

Toyota doesn't consider its obsessions to be, well, excessive.

Says Ikawa: "We have a sincere desire to achieve the highest level of technology and craftsmanship in the world."

Lexus ingredients
Toyota relies on 3 key elements to ensure that the LS 600h L is built to its exacting standards.
1. TRAINING: All workers are trained physically and mentally.
2. CLEANLINESS: Safeguards are followed to make sure neither workers nor parts bring contaminants into the engine
and final-assembly plant.
3. INSPECTIONS: Human skill combines with computerized exactitude to catch any imperfection.

http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...9/SUB/70705024

Originally Posted by rajwany

for a $100,000 toyota. they cannot afford to screw up.