Inside TPS at Toyota, Georgetown, Kentucky by Ralph Rio:

Automation is used but is seen as a tool for helping people manage the process. This can be contrasted with the effort by GM in the 1990’s to spend billions of dollars on robots to save personnel costs.

Both Toyota and GM seek to use technology to improve but Toyota sees the technology as useful to help people to be more efficient, eliminate menial repetitive tasks, eliminate tasks that cause injury… and it seems to me GM saw technology as a way to eliminate people. The action showed a company that viewed people as a cost to be eliminated. GM did not act as though people were their “most important assets” as we so often hear, but see so little evidence of in the action of companies.

Toyota does try to reduce overall costs (including labor costs) by continually improving and making cars more and more efficiently (so they can produce cars using fewer hours of labor in the future than they need today). Trying to become more efficient by engaging everyone in the effort is a part of the system of management at Toyota. The current Toyota employees are an important part of the system and are not viewed as a cost to eliminate. The management used by many other companies seems to view employees as just a marginal costs to be eliminated whenever possible.

Reinventing the Industrial Giant by Nitin Nohria, Davis Dyer and Frederick Dalzell:

Can’t Run Robots Without People by Hedrick Smith: