intimately. They know when all of the new car programs will begin and the basic
goals of those programs. They come up with ideas for the design before even
being asked.
Today, Toyota has stepped up its simultaneous engineering initiative, getting
input from suppliers on their manufacturing capabilities when it is still a concept
and before the body is even styled. American suppliers, lacking that history and
intimate knowledge, are unable to work with the vague specifications in theearly
stages of simultaneous engineering. A new group was set up in Toyota purchas-
ing to help American suppliers participate in simultaneous engineering. According
to an executive from Toyota’s North American purchasing department:
The degree of simultaneous engineering in Japan is so high, our engineers have to
give vague specifications early in the program. Experienced suppliers know how
to feed their design and manufacturing requirements to Toyota even with this
uncertainty, and those less experienced do not understand the timing of that and
how to do it. Our role [in North American headquarters] is to help suppliers by
reviewing Toyota’s technical information jointly with the supplier and trying to
help the supplier fully meet the early and vague Toyota requirements. The sup-
pliers have the technical capability if they have the information, and we help them
get it and interpret it.
Not all suppliers have the capability. Their American customers do not have
the same requirements for information as Toyota, and therefore do not always
keep the detailed manufacturing data Toyota needs to set its design specifica-
tions—a frustrating situation for Toyota and its suppliers. As a young American
auto body engineer working at the Toyota Technical Center explained:
New suppliers are hard to work for, particularly when it comes to getting toler-
ance data. For fitting their parts into our body design, we want the tolerance
between two points of fit. Our suppliers may come to us and say we cannot hold
the level of tolerances you are requesting. We know other suppliers can hold
tighter tolerances. So we ask why. They simply don’t have the data. In one case
recently it was clear the supplier fudged the data. They gave us data on hundreds
of parts and they averaged out to exactly .5 for all the parts—we knew that was
completely improbable and they fudged it. “Go and see” is the biggest thing—we
live that. In the process, we teach them what our data requirements are and how
we collect and analyze the data.
Toyota continues to invest heavily in teaching Americans their way, and the
capabilities are gradually building in America. Toyota has made major invest-
ments in its technical center in Michigan, which is continuing to expand rapidly,
and its suppliers are making comparable investments in Michigan R&D facilities.
The 2005, Toyota Avalon was the first entire vehicle to be principally engineered
in the United States. There was still a lot of involvement from Toyota engineers in
Japan, but the development was directed out of Michigan. Developing engineer-