<story><title>Toyota&apos;s Takaoka #2 Line: The Most Flexible Line in the World</title><url>http://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2-line-the-most-flexible-line-in-the-world</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>not_kurt_godel</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t doubt the line is much more efficient and flexible as claimed, but the article doesn&amp;#x27;t do a very good job explaining exactly how the gains are achieved beyond hand-waving about clever contraptions that are faster than robots and the ability to dynamically move stations around. It seems difficult to imagine that hordes of industrial engineers haven&amp;#x27;t done the calculations on each of these methods countless times at all car manufacturing companies. There must be deeper, more subtle factors that explain why Toyota&amp;#x27;s particular combination of techniques yields such superior results. Perhaps it&amp;#x27;s just the culmination of a lot of long-tail optimizations that only Toyota has had time and capital to let mature or maybe there really is just &amp;quot;one secret trick&amp;quot; that underpins it all - the article doesn&amp;#x27;t really give a good sense of what it might be. In either case it&amp;#x27;d be interesting to see a detailed breakdown with numbers comparing the various lines with explanations for why particular decisions were or weren&amp;#x27;t made to truly understand why the system works so well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rubinelli</author><text>&amp;gt;  It seems difficult to imagine that hordes of industrial engineers haven&amp;#x27;t done the calculations on each of these methods countless times at all car manufacturing companies.&lt;p&gt;Yes, it&amp;#x27;s the Ford method: you hire the smartest people you can to lay out the best plan, and a bunch of interchangeable grunts to just execute. But it turns out that the person that has to do that work 40 hours a week has a much better chance to find ways to make it more efficient, and if you build a culture where that&amp;#x27;s encouraged, that&amp;#x27;s what they do. If there is &amp;quot;one secret trick&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s probably that an employee that feels that they own their work does a much better job than one that acts like a cog in the machine someone else designed.</text></comment>
<story><title>Toyota&apos;s Takaoka #2 Line: The Most Flexible Line in the World</title><url>http://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2-line-the-most-flexible-line-in-the-world</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>not_kurt_godel</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t doubt the line is much more efficient and flexible as claimed, but the article doesn&amp;#x27;t do a very good job explaining exactly how the gains are achieved beyond hand-waving about clever contraptions that are faster than robots and the ability to dynamically move stations around. It seems difficult to imagine that hordes of industrial engineers haven&amp;#x27;t done the calculations on each of these methods countless times at all car manufacturing companies. There must be deeper, more subtle factors that explain why Toyota&amp;#x27;s particular combination of techniques yields such superior results. Perhaps it&amp;#x27;s just the culmination of a lot of long-tail optimizations that only Toyota has had time and capital to let mature or maybe there really is just &amp;quot;one secret trick&amp;quot; that underpins it all - the article doesn&amp;#x27;t really give a good sense of what it might be. In either case it&amp;#x27;d be interesting to see a detailed breakdown with numbers comparing the various lines with explanations for why particular decisions were or weren&amp;#x27;t made to truly understand why the system works so well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>georgeek</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s the whole concept of kaizen, or improvement: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Kaizen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Kaizen&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>