Part B – Toyota Production System Report
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is a socio-technical system developed by no less than Toyota Corporation, the largest automobile manufacturer in the planet. The said system summarizes their management and production principles and philosophies. What makes the said system fascinating is the fact that it is one of the reasons why Toyota has been continuously bagged awards in its industry and is now being hailed as the alpha in the international automobile industry—both by its customers and business analysts. In Part A of this report, the author has outlined the different advantages of the TPS, how it can be used in one’s everyday life, and how it can improve efficiency in various ways. It is worth iterating that the objective was to improve the way how the small-sized kitchen of a flat located at the Unitec Village, a living space typically occupied by 5 people, can be used efficiently and safely.
The problems identified were 1) the storage spaces were not being used optimally 2) the available space (e.g. refrigerator space) was actually limited. Although the discussion was limited to these two problems, there were numerous problems that the use and implementation of the TPS actually solved. Those problems were, in fact, related to the main objectives of the TPS namely: reduction of overproduction; reduced waiting times, reduced transportation costs; more efficient processing, reduced stock at hand, more efficient movement of resources, and reduction of the production of defective products. As it turns out, the end result of the application of the TPS in the target kitchen has led to an overall improvement with the way how it was being utilized by no less than five people living in the flat at the time of observation.
More Efficient Use of Storage Spaces
One of the main objectives of the TPOS is to address an organization or in this case, an entire household’s problems on the movement of resources. This is the 6th main objective of the TPS to be specific and it has been identified as one of the main problems in the current case. Judging from the images presented, it would definitely be hard for five people to fit inside the crumpled space that the kitchen offers. So, the best way to address this problem is to create a schedule for each of the five people so that each of them can do their respective kitchen-related businesses without having to suffer from space inefficiencies and although unlikely, even suffocation.
Storage spaces are limited so what they want to do to address this is to make sure that everything is labeled. They cannot get away with a conjugal space wherein anyone can just use any space he wants to; they have to be more organized. Equal sharing of storage spaces may be necessary. Additionally, other non-kitchen spaces may be used for some applicable non-kitchen items, especially the dry ones, if the space really is not enough.
In terms of actual kitchen space usage, what they want to do here is to create a kitchen schedule based on their work schedules—assuming that the main reason why the five people occupying the flat rented a flat that size is so that they could live near their respective work places. This way, they could systematically decide the sequence of people who would use the kitchen.
Once the respective sequence of their kitchen schedules has been determined, they should decide the amount of time that they would allocate for each user. Assuming that there are five users, they can allocate two hours for each person. This means that for an entire day, the kitchen would be used continuously—depending on the schedule that they would come up with, for ten hours, which is good enough because there are in fact twenty four hours in a single day which means that from an efficiency-centric perspective alone, the kitchen would still be free for the remaining fourteen hours.
Two hours is more than enough for a person to cook a dish, eat a meal, and then clean the plates. However, it is important to note that for this TPS-based kitchen usage scheme to work, the kitchen users have to adhere to their respective time schedules because a single disturbance, regardless of how many minutes worth, would disrupt the entire system.
Another major objective of the TPS that have been addressed in this case as well would be objective number two, which focuses on the wastage of time on hand (or waiting). With this new scheduling scheme, the people inside the flat would not have to wait for each other just to be able to use the kitchen. They would, in theory, save a lot more time if each of them would have a designated time where they can do their kitchen businesses than if they are going to just rush into the kitchen altogether and do their businesses there all at the same time.
The second scenario would most likely take a lot of time from them. Assuming that it would take them four hours to complete all of their kitchen duties, multiply that by five (because there are five participants), then the total number of hours lost would be twenty. Now, compare that to the total number of hours used if the proposed TPS-based kitchen approach would be used which would only be ten; that would translate to at least ten hours’ worth of saved time. Based on theory and numbers, using this proposed TPS-based approach would really be beneficial for the small organization composed by the five flat occupants sharing the same kitchen in the current case.
The Limited Space of the Kitchen
Toyota Motors Corporation manufactures its cars in closely monitored spaces inside its factories. It highlights the efficient use of space. This means that the spaces where its various departments and divisions do their respective works do not have to be large—they just have to be well-utilized.
The argument that the author of this paper is trying to make here is that there really is no need for the people living inside the flat to renovate the kitchen in an effort to make it more spacious. The main reason behind this argument is the fact that they could do without this renovation—assuming that they could religiously follow the proposed TPS-based scheduling theme.
Conclusions
In conclusion, the author of this paper saw a dramatic improvement with the way how the kitchen inside the flat has been utilized by the five occupants. Ever since they started doing their routine kitchen businesses on a scheduled basis, each of the occupants were able to complete all their tasks faster, safer, more cleanly, and most importantly, more completely.
The only disadvantage that they reported was that they lost the freedom to use the kitchen whenever they wanted to—something which they were enjoying before. They also had to adjust their cooking and eating times so that they would not disrupt the currently scheduled person’s kitchen business—something that the other occupants of the flat would have to be willing to do for them as well. Generally, however, the use of the schedule and TPS-based approach was more effective in making use of the limited kitchen space and ensuring that all stakeholders’ concerns were adequately addressed.
