176 THETOYOTAWAYFIELDBOOK
You don’t just announce to people, “Starting today, things will be different!”
and suddenly the culture is changed. How do you change the supervisor who
for the past 30 years has learned to survive within the old system? How do you
change the mind-set about how people’s performance is measured? If people
are measured on output, how will they respond? There is more to this than just
deciding that from now on, we will stop to fix problems.
The following list includes many of the things you will need to do in order
to be able to effectively create a “stop the line” culture and system. Note that
when we refer to “stop the line,” we are also referring to stopping a machine or
stopping the work process. It means that the work is halted when a problem is
discovered.
1. Understand your current culture and why it developed.
2. Create a clear vision for change.
3. Pay attention to the respect and dignity of the people.
4. Establish a reasonable degree of stability in processes.
5. Have a method to stop the line.
6. The process must provide an audible and visual indication of the exact
point of the problem. (Forget about paging systems!)
7. Have people designated to respond when the line stops.
8. Define the roles and procedure for response to problems.area. This included removal of the seats and much of the interior trim
work. I know that this type of major repair, in addition to being costly,
almost assuredly results in a product that is inferior to the original work.
Reworking and replacing trim and seats is a significant cause of “squeaks
and rattles” after time, and those issues are very annoying to customers.
In the end we completely walked away from the problem. We did not
go to the end of the line to make sure the defect was identified and
the repair done (preventing the escape to the customer), nor did we
go to find the source to prevent further occurrence. We simply left!
I came to understand many other underlying issues later. For example,
if a supervisor (or other person) finds a problem and points it out to
the worker, the worker could file a complaint with the union that they
were being “badgered.” While the claim may be unsubstantiated, the
hassle of dealing with it is greater than the the hassle of fixing the prob-
lem later. The antagonistic environment between management and the
workforce that has been honed for decades prevents cooperation
(although I did find out that there are exceptional people who truly
wanted to make things better). This is part of the culture that would
need to change if the “stop the line” strategy was going to work here.