What Embraer can learn from Toyota

Embraer recently announced a partnership with the world’s largest car maker, Toyota, to introduce the Toyota Production System (TPS) into its aircraft manufacturing and assembly processes. TPS perfectly fits Embraer’s plans to reduce production lead times by forty percent next year, as AirInsight reported before. We discussed the partnership with Toyota in a bit more detail at the Farnborough Airshow with Luis Marino, Executive Vice President of Operations. What Embraer can learn from Toyota.

First some information about what the Toyota Production System stands for from the car maker’s own website: “TPS was established based on two concepts: “jidoka” (which can be loosely translated as “automation with a human touch”), as when a problem occurs, the equipment stops immediately, preventing defective products from being produced; and the “Just-in-Time” concept, in which each process produces only what is needed for the next process in a continuous flow. Based on the basic philosophies of jidoka and Just-in-Time, TPS can efficiently and quickly produce vehicles of sound quality, one at a time, that fully satisfy customer requirements.”

Embraer

has embraced the Japanese industrial culture (including Kaizen) for quite some time now, says Luis Marino. But the airframer was looking for more improvements: “We are in this journey for lean manufacturing since 2007, so for fifteen years now. But it is a continuous improvement, we are learning a lot, but we asked them to show us what we need to improve more. That’s why we hired them.”