Toyota has a section on their web site called Planet Kaizen: “what happens when you dig a little deeper and peel back the sheet metal to discover what makes a Toyota a Toyota.”
It requires flash to view Planet Kaizen. I think it has amazingly bad visual controls (as do many flash applications). I can’t figure out why it would be done in flash - other than some marketing person, or IT person, thought it would be cool. I certainly don’t see how kaizen practices could have produced such an application. It seems to me one of the examples of how far Toyota still has to go.
Of course, as an automobile manufacturer failing to develop web applications well, is better than failing at manufacturing cars well. I would guess that this “planet kaizen” was not created by Toyota employees but instead outsourced to someone else. If it was done internally, I think Toyota’s management of marketing with technology may be in as much need of help as GM’s entire management is. In any case the non-manufacturing parts of Toyota, while some are managed well, still have plenty of room to improve.
September 5th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
[...] Related posts: Toyota IT for Kaizen - Planet Kaizen - Toyota Robots - management blog posts on information technology While no exact figures are available, Toyota says Dealer Daily saves the company and its dealers tens of millions of dollars. Toyota also surveyed 3,000 of its dealership employees and found that the average person who had been using the text-based system saved 1.8 hours per day by using Dealer Daily. [...]