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.” About introducing TPS, Marino says: “They (Toyota) will help us to realize a further reduction in cycle times and efficiency improvements for this particular Kaizen (continues improvement) and to teach us a little bit more. When we started with lean, we started with Shingijutsu principles. Now, we have hired let’s say the teachers of lean manufacturing to get the benefits for the medium term.” It will be a never-ending learning process: “Exactly. As I said, it is a journey. We started last year and were able to reduce lead times by seventeen percent and now we are going to look for forty percent.” During the Media Days in May, Francisco Gomes Neto said that the forty percent leade time reduction target included all programs, but this was later corrected to exclude the KC-390 multirole transporter as the tanker follows its own production rates. But Luis Marino explains that the KC-390 will, eventually, also benefit from the lessons learned to reduce lead times: “So far, the KC-390 is on a different production schedule, but everything that we will learn from the commercial aircraft programs we will apply to defense as well. We will learn from this pilot and will spread it through the entire company.” Embraer is not convinced that robots will be introduced soon on its assembly lines. (Embraer) Supply chain constraints Introducing just-in-time production principles at a time when the supply chain has difficulty keeping it because of material and labor shortages sounds conflicting. But TPS is not something for just tomorrow, it will be for the years ahead, stresses Marino: “Of course, at this moment we are having some hurdles in the supply chain, but they will disappear. The supply will meet our needs and then we will be ready to reduce the cycle times. We expect to reach this target next year. It will save money too because as we reduce cycle time, we will spend less money on operations and spend it on something else.” Even before the supply chain issues, automation and robotization have been progressing in the world of aircraft manufacturing and assembly. Airbus uses robots on the A320neo line in Hamburg and will increase the number, Boeing has them too although reduced them on the 777X line. Embraer has its E-jets painted by two robots. Yet, automation and robotization at Embraer will not happen overnight, says Marino: “The way we think about automation is as follows. First, we need to stabilize the production process. We won’t introduce automation until we have fixed the process. Then we have to trade off if we want to have robots. Because if you introduce robots into a process that is not right, you are going to lose efficiency from automation. That’s what we learned from Toyota: first, stabilize the process. Of course, robots are also expensive from a capital expenditure point of view, but during this journey, we are going to look for opportunities for improving the process and some kind of automation without robots.” Embraer expects to fully benefit from the Toyota Production System in the coming years, notably when there won’t be just E-jets on the assembly lines in Sao Jose dos Campos, but also the yet-to-be-launched turboprop. “For sure, we can try to use the same assets we have to produce both the E2 and the turboprop. Then we will get more stability and improve the utilization of our assets. This will reduce the need for Capex,” says Luis Marino.
